


a kind of integrity

by twigcollins



Series: moments in another time [13]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-27
Updated: 2012-08-10
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:35:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 56,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twigcollins/pseuds/twigcollins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“His name truly is Balthier, and he is in turns an idiot, a showman, a thief, a hopeless romantic, the luckiest man in Ivalice and simply too stupid to die.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."

At fourteen, Balthier - he thinks of himself that way now, even in reminiscence - stole his first single-engine racer, an experimental model from his father’s lab, long before he’d known to hate the name Draklor. This was after he’d enhanced two of his own well past their limits, substantially upgrading the engines for speed and power before upgrading them even further into a bevy of slightly charred scrap scattered across a length of lawn in the midlevels. The new, sleek craft had considerably more impressive limits, and he thought he’d managed to improve even on those.

Which meant that when he nicked the wall at twice past what should have been top speed, the crash was - by all accounts - a truly spectacular sight, and the fact that he hadn’t been wearing a helmet seemed rather superfluous against his certain doom.

Balthier had bounced twice, unconscious before he’d hit the second time, and finally landed, smoldering and upside down in a hedge.

Three days and half the night later, he woke up, bandaged from head to toe and aching from a good deal of magic applied very quickly, feeling half out of his head, with Cid sitting nearby, going carefully over his ever-present collection of papers. It is the way Balthier best remembers the man who had been his father, before the days that had come to crowd out all others, before the Doctor and his experiments had replaced anything else worth remembering: Cid, with his head bowed, intent on his work, the pen scratching lightly in unerring, brisk notations.

He must have made a noise then, because his father looked up, and in those days of long ago had actually set his work aside. Moved the chair closer to where Balthier lay, and asked him if he thought the crash had been a more of a issue with the brake systems or the ring alignment.

It is a fond memory, of a better time.

———————————————————-

Mjrn is the one to find the body. Fran is out hunting when her sister appears, so wide-eyed and breathless that for a moment she cannot even speak, pointing back the way she has come.

It is a hume - or was. A male hume, and Fran can see where he must have fallen, a patch of earth made unsteady by the recent rains, just waiting for some unwary traveler to take a fatal misstep. As she makes her way down, catching at the vine-laced trees with her claws, Fran can see his head is tilted at an unnatural angle, his neck snapped. Quick and clean, from such a height he would have died instantly. She can hear Mjrn behind her, would keep her sister at a distance had it been a more violent end, but this is all but bloodless. So silly, these humes, that they live such short lives and seem eager to find new ways to whittle down even those few hours. Not the first hume to venture into their Wood, nor the first to die in it.

“Was he looking for the village?” Mjrn says in a small voice, keeping her distance. Jote often tells tales of humes, who know little more than how to steal and to destroy, who would seize the Wood for themselves and take it all, if the Viera did not have the blessing of the Green Word and the Wood’s powerful magicks to keep them safe.

“Perhaps.” Fran doubts it, not alone. He is oddly dressed for a conqueror, at the very least, no armor or fancy weapons. Only a short sword - and that is no surprise, even she would not wander the Wood unarmed. Fran approaches, hearing Mjrn inhale sharply behind her as she kneels down. The hume’s pack has spilled out around him, Fran can smell tobacco, soap, the tanned hide of the bag itself. A flash of color catches her eye - pigments in a small metal box, like those they use in Eryut, though these are far more vivid: azure as blue as the sky, shades of purple and red that could match many of the Wood’s brightest blooms.

A glimpse of the same hue near the body, and Fran moves closer, a small book still clutched, half-open in the lifeless hand. Fran murmurs a soft apology as she pulls it free, that he will understand it is only curiosity. Always better to respect those who walk the next path, whoever they might be, that they will feel no need to look back.

Mjrn creeps closer, looking over her shoulder as she slowly turns the pages. Words on the inside cover, more beneath some of the pictures. Meaningless to them, of course, though the drawings speak with an eloquence all their own. It seems the man was an artist as well as a traveler, and Fran has heard and seen of some of those peoples he has sketched out, all those who pass through the Wood. Seeq, and the bangaa, and moogles as well. The world outside is little like Eryut, and full of infinite variety. Full to bursting with humes most of all, she knows, in the north and south and all in between, all with their own rules and laws and little common allegiance. Cities packed with them, and the man has sketched some of those here as well, skylines so vast they cover two pages. Towers so tall he had set the book vertically to capture them in full, garlanded at their heights by airships, which Fran has ever only seen at a great distance, looking out from the very edge of the Wood.

Fran had passed up the chance at leading the village years ago, and there were those - her sister among them - who still wondered at her decision, confused by her reluctance. Jote, who may have known how she has taken to roaming in wider and wider circuits, but keeps her opinions, as always, to herself. The village had been enough, once, but looking down on these colorful pages, all the world’s wonders, Fran cannot help but feel the return of a pang that is like nothing else so much as the Voice of the Wood, the Green Word, even though this voice speaks pure betrayal to all that she knows.

It it is a waste, her life in Eryut - the word is close to sacrilege but Fran cannot help herself for thinking it. She is foolish to move through her days here, one exactly like the next, when there is a whole world beyond. A whole new life, with nothing keeping her from it but the refusal to act, to move forward and _go_.

“Look! I think that is Relj, there in his book!”

Mjrn leans down, as Fran turns the page to reveal a page of sketches of her sisters, and another, and it seems that yes, he was looking for a path into the village, though perhaps not with the ill-intent of those who have come before. The illustrations are very good, Fran believes she can recognize many of those who have ventured out of Eryut, the exiled. The viera are captured in fine and careful detail, along with studies of their weapons or armor, some of it foreign, other items she recognizes as village-made. A few of them are painted in profile, looking into some greater distance, and Fran wonders if any of them regret the choice. Knowing what they do, if they would yet again trade the wide world, no matter what its distractions, for the whispers of the Green Word that breathe even now beneath her skin, ever at her side. Living here in the Wood, where she is sleek and strong and silent. Jote would call it madness, has done so, but would she be as harsh, if Fran had not grown so fond of her solitary walks?

It will hurt to leave. It will hurt to stay.

“What do we do with the body?” Her sister says softly, and Fran sighs, and reaches out, runs the tip of one blunted claw along the edge of the dead man’s face. So very young, even for a hume, to give up all that he knew and understood - to come to her world, seeking more.

“We will bury him. I believe it is what they do with their kind.”

Fran does not think he would mind it, laid to rest here, to become one with the Wood. The work does not take long with Mjrn’s help, and when they have made a proper grave she leaves to gather flowers for his feet, to welcome his first steps into the next world. Fran collects what has fallen from the pack, to set at his side, but stops herself, as she is about to put the book back into his hands. It is a decision to be made, right here, and though the change may happen slowly, she knows there will not be a going back. Her hand tightens, and then relaxes, and Fran realizes she is holding her breath.

If Mjrn even notices the slim tome in her sister’s hand as they return to the village, she says nothing of it.

—————————————————————————

The sun is just considering its twilight arc, shadowed behind wide, flat bands of clouds that cover the western sky over Bhujerba. A strong wind ruffles her fur as Fran leans against the rail of a rooftop garden, claws delicately picking out the seeds of a pomegranate. It is her favorite indulgence, fruits that were once unknown to her: blood oranges and Rozarrian sweet pears, but especially the pomegranates. The city is well built up here, terraced houses on varying levels creating a canopy of rooftops, pathways cut here and there between them that end in high walls and, beyond, wide green spaces. Private gardens, thick with carefully tended flowers - the compounds of the elite. Great estates that might be home to but a single hume and yet span half the size of Eryut, and from where she stands her sharp eyes can pick out the lord and lady of the nearest of these as they move out of doors, slowly making their way to a small, private airship docked at small cliff at the edge of the property. A line of guards attends them silently, armor shining as the clouds shift and the sun briefly reappears.

Fran does her own scouting, always, even when the moogles’ advice seems trustworthy. Only a few of them seem to work directly as thieves, and those mostly in teams, posing as workers or performing troupes. The rest are content to trade more safely in information, or as house staff willing to cut the occasional deal. A few coins, to ensure the right lock is flipped at a particular moment, or a window is left conveniently open after hours. Ubiquitous and unassuming, it seems a rare hume that can tell one from another with any sense of certainty, which tends to lower the risk of accountability, and they are all remarkably well-informed. Fran can’t imagine that all moogles can know each other, surely not across all Ivalice, yet she had saved a mapmaker in a caravan she’d signed on to protect in eastern Archadia, and by the time she’d reached Balfonheim, some three weeks later, there had been a warm welcome - by name - from nearly every other moogle that she’d come across, no matter the guild.

Viera do not blend particularly well, though Fran has found she has many other useful assets at her command. Nimble and quick, able to adapt her tactics to any number of varied opponents, and she can usually smell out a trap tile from the other end of a room. Most importantly she is willing to be patient, to take as much time as is required to ensure her success. As much a humiliation as a danger, were she foolish enough to be caught.

At the beginning, fresh into the world, Fran had made her living from the forests well to the west of Eryut, their secrets still open to her even as the Green Word faded from her ears. It had been a difficult time, even knowing it would be so, and the ache of the loss had hewn her to the unfamiliar trees for longer than she had intended to stay. Still, she had been skilled enough to keep comfortable, trading pelts and wild mushrooms with whatever trader happened by. The tender delicacies were common enough to those of Eryut, but it seemed they were not easily found by humes, and considered a high luxury.

At last, though, Fran had become ill at ease with familiarity, the forests unnerving in their silence. She took to the trade roads, wandering and guarding nomads and travelers, those who would not, or could not carry their goods by air. She learned to read, both the hume standard and even some ancient Kildean, from a scholar making her own slow pilgrimage across what seemed nearly all of Ivalice, seeking out places of myth and legend connected to the Dynast-King. It was from her that Fran learned all she could ask of hume history - they were fascinating creatures, and the final word that seemed to rule them all - ambition - seemed both beautiful promise and terrible curse. The ambitions of small men to become great, of dangerous men to be warlords, even the holiest among them always seeking, ever striving for more. Had this been what the hume in the forest had brought with him? Passed it along to Fran even after his death, the final weight to tip the balance, the spark for her own great ambition?

The question haunts her, as the months turn to years, as time seems to linger, rather than pass by. What is it she seeks to do? What is so important here, that the Wood could not provide?

As a viera, new magicks come easily, though there are more spells woven by humes than those in the Wood could have ever imagined. Necessary, for a world with far more dangers, but as she continues on Fran finds she is not at all unprepared for the challenge. Noticed and feared for her sharp eyes, and sharper claws, the reputation of the viera alone enough to ensure peace on some journeys where she stands guard. She is respected, even feared, simply for her silence and - oddly enough - the way she looks. The humes think that she is beautiful, and that she is wise, and though Jote had looked at the outside world with scorn and pity, Fran does not find it as easy to cast judgment, as she walks among those who must live in it. Ivalice is as mercurial, as swift to change as a quicksilver fish. Even with her nimble speed she might as well reach out and catch nothing, and there has never been a Wood for any of those she meets - the desperate, the poor, the defenseless. No Green Word even in memory to guide them, let alone to call them home. It is a privilege, she comes to realize, that she chose to leave. A gift, rarer than she thought, that there is something in her past she can regret leaving behind.

So many people here, so many different _kinds_ of people, and Fran learns that there are those who will gladly turn predator to their kin, in this land where there is not enough for all. It is not difficult, then, to start collecting bounties, the hunting much the same for marks as it is for beasts, and the rewards far greater. It is still a challenge, the first few times she steps into a city to take up a hunt or collect her reward. Unnerving, disorienting with so many smells and sounds and people - but so many wonders as well. With her always is the book, and no matter where she is Fran takes her time, tracks down all that has been sketched and painted and spoken of on the pages she can now read. Fran knows his name, and someday she will find where this hume had lived, and if there are those who might wish to know of his fate.

He had drawn even where she is now, in Bhujerba: the narrow streets of the north quarter; the great waterfall that thunders over the nearest, disconnected island of land to the west, where water turns to vapor and cloud in midair. He’d painted the transparent shadows of the great jutting planes of crystal that tower benevolently over all, holding the whole island aloft - and there are more than a few places in the city with veins of raw ore strong enough to make her fur stand on end.

Bhujerba is a land of great wealth and power and elegance, with travelers ever moving in and out, providing an easy cover for all sorts of opportunity. The mark who had been the first to suggest she might consider such a life, it had been his view that the sky city was the best place to make fast money, and then simply disappear. Fran had taken him in after that, only to break him out an hour later, when the Judge who had placed the bounty tried to take custody without paying.

Her first step into a life of crime, and it had been easy enough after that. Fran had worked her way through a few Archadian cities - never caught, never even close - before buying a first-class ticket on a rather fine skyship, and a ‘special’ map of Bhujerba, the Moogles as proud to vouch for the locations of the city’s finest houses and current owners as they were to point out the best tourist spots, though with their voices slightly lowered.

It isn’t a necessary occupation. If she wished, Fran could make no small fortune simply by breathing. Viera are rare, and what is rare is precious, and she has heard there are those of her kind who are paid handsomely to pose for artists, or even more so simply to stand at the side of wealthy patrons, to do nothing more than be beautiful. It strikes her as utterly absurd, though the idea of theft itself is no less an oddity. No reason for any in Eryut to have more than what they had need of, and nothing even then that could not be easily replaced. The Wood provided always, even the concept of ‘want’ unfamiliar there. It is not so in the rest of Ivalice, where there are those who starve within sight of those who feast, surrounded by enough treasure to last them ten lifetimes.

Fran feels no pangs of conscience, taking from those who will not miss the loss, and the object she is after today is of particular, personal import, a Viera treasure. An unbroken length of a long-shattered staff, crystal-tipped. Several centuries old, and the man who has just taken off in his airship is in no way a good or noble man, and does not deserve to hold such a prize a day longer. Fran sets what is left of her pomegranate on the railing, easing over the side and back down to street level. With any luck, given the number of guards and their usual patterns of laziness when their employers are away, she will be back to finish it before the moon is up.

Fran’s ears are quite good, but every sound still echoes off the streets and again off the walls, and even in the mostly quiet, empty street she is on the din of all Bhujerba is a low roar, like the scouring of some distant sea - which means she does not hear the sound of light footsteps until after they have left the rooftop across from where she stands. A sudden, half-swallowed shout and the sound of rippling fabric, and the woman lands squarely on top of her.

    A waterfall of silk and flailing limbs.  After a moment, Fran manages to get her hands steady on the ground, pushing back and away, catching a glimpse of bright eyes just briefly, beneath a veil of cloth.

    “Hello, there!”

    A rather deep voice for a hume woman, and the scent that assaults her nose is anything but female, even half-buried as it is beneath a wave of rose perfume.  The man finally emerges from the cocoon of his skirts, with an expression altogether too merry and confident for the way his undergarments threaten to ride up around his ears.

    “I always _was_ a bit better at getting these things undone.”  He says in a smooth, warm voice, only to fiddle uselessly with the bodice for another moment, before slicing the laces instead, cutting the ruffled fabric off his shoulders and stepping up and out of the ruined dress.  At least, thank the gods, he is wearing pants. 

    Fran has already found her feet when he looks at her again, and she expects the open, half-awed stare most hume males care to favor her with - but his is not quite the same, since there is not a hint of shame to be found in it.  Fully aware she knows that he is staring, and why, and therefore taking his time to appreciate her properly.  He’s also bleeding, a scratch just below his hairline, though he doesn’t seem to notice.

    “I believe you require… aid.”  Or perhaps an Esuna.  Or to be tossed off another roof.  
     
He waves the thought away like an annoying bug, dusting his bare chest off as if smoothing wrinkles from a fine shirt. Muscular, but not overly so. A thin scar runs along the length of his collarbone, another pale mark, star-shaped along his side.  “Don’t trouble yourself.  A head injury adds a bit of fun to our first encounter, don’t you think?”

    “I see him!  There he is!”  A bangaa’s roar, several rooftops away, and Fran can hear the heavy tread of further pursuit, angry voices echoing down to where they are. It is no surprise, to see the man’s head jerk in the direction of the loudest cry.  “Get him!”

    “He’s got an accomplice!”

    “Balthier, you shit!  We’re going to string you up by your balls and sink you into the sandsea!”  
   
    “My cue.” He says, _sotto voce_ , and grins at her again. Or has simply not stopped grinning all this time. “If you’re looking for the Viscount’s precious treasure, I’m afraid I’ve already stolen it.”  He shakes a loosely wrapped bundle in his other hand, a glint of crystal visible inside.  “However, you are welcome to take part in the daring escape.”

    As if there is a choice.  Fran glares, but it is only at the back of the man’s head - he is already up and running, and as a bullet pings against the tiles to her left, it seems but prudent to follow.  Quick on his feet, for a hume, though if this is his usual escape plan Fran can see the need for such swiftness.  The man nimbly makes his way over walls and across rooftops, skidding to a sudden stop at the end of the last of these, overlooking a wide plaza with no particularly good exit points and what seem to be a number of city guards who are but moments away from noticing them. A fast glance left and right that suggests he is only now considering his next move, that perhaps what she took for decisiveness and preparation was simply random desperation.  All of Fran’s exit strategies involved taking a right three corners back - she had trusted this man, though at the moment she cannot imagine why.  Perhaps she is the one who needs the Esuna.

“Ha!”

This man, this Balthier sounds pleased, though Fran sees no reason for it, nor moments later as she follows him, halting at the corner of the roof while he leaps off without hesitation, as if expecting to grow wings halfway down. He lands straddling a small skycraft - Fran is familiar with them at a distance, though she has not seen the need to try one for herself - not until now, it seems. The movements he makes are deft and sure, the crack of metal giving way beneath a tool that flicks in and out of his hand - what she will learn is a rather brute force method, only for times of great duress. It takes but a moment, no one yet noticing as the engine whines softly and it lifts from the ground. Three bangaa skid into view on the other end of the pavilion, shouting for Balthier’s blood and other vital organs. This attracts the attention of the city guard, as well as a man who instantly draws his sword when he sees his vessel so commandeered.

It is a glimpse of the future in all its glory, though Fran does not know that yet, her only thought at the moment that this Balthier is secure in his escape and she has nothing to tempt him with. Almost before she has finished thinking it, he has brought the ship up and wheeled it around, looking at her in expectation. It had never even crossed his mind to leave her behind. Fran leaps on, only to let out a surprised little sound as the machine lurches into life, one arm around his chest and she feels him flinch where her claws dig in, yet he hasn’t slowed down, the cries of outrage fading as the bike screams through the streets. It is nearly night now, the lights on the streets flashing by, not nearly enough to illuminate the paths in front of them. Fran thinks that she can see better than this hume possibly can, and they are _still_ going too fast for her, faster than she has ever moved in the whole of her life. Screams ahead, angry shouts as Balthier nearly topples a cart while running over its owner, the chaos almost instantly behind them, disappearing into the dark.

A sudden flash, a burst of fire that makes the whole craft shudder, and she turns to see they are indeed being pursued. Three ships similar to the one they ride, at least one of the passengers casting spells, flashes of lightning crackling through the air, exploding just in front of them though it does not seem to bother Balthier at all. Fran hears him laugh a little under his breath, and though the bright flares have done their best to blind her he is quite happy to fly on instinct, with any lack of crashing seeming entirely coincidental. At the moment, Fran half wishes she were a hume herself, that it would be enough to close her eyes and not feel the tiny craft wobble beneath her, the hot spark of its pulsing heart. How close the walls loom, a matter of mere inches as Balthier pushes into the turns, sharp and fast enough to send her stomach right up into her throat.

It is a merry chase, Balthier roaring down the narrow spaces between buildings, threading up and under rows of bridges without any hesitation - if he has touched the brakes once, she has not felt it. At any moment Fran expects to hear the sound of a terrible crash past the roar of the wind in her ears, yet it seems Balthier is winning the pure battle of nerves, at least one of the ships deciding his capture is not worth the risk of near-certain destruction. The second falls behind as he pushes the bike even faster along a wide, empty plain with the moon tracing a silver path, Bhujerba stretching off to their right and a high-pitched whine from the engine that Fran cannot imagine is anything good.

It is just about the time that Fran realizes where they are, the emptiness around them due to the fact that this edge of the island is not at all stable or solid - in some places little more than floating gravel - that Balthier shuts off the few lights they do have, and kills the engine, braking hard. It sweeps the back of the bike out in a long arc, and she does not look down, does not think about the way the ship’s magicite is not enough to keep them from falling, should they tumble off the edge of Bhujerba itself, sliding out into open air. A moment later, and he’s got them tucked in the shadows of a jutting spar of rock, the last of their pursuit roaring past. Fran feels as if her wits have been left well behind, too slow to keep up, her heart thudding in her chest, a tingling across her skin, all the way down to her fingertips - and Balthier is surely bleeding from where she’d dug her claws into him, though he says nothing, flashing her a moonlit grin over one shoulder. The third ship reappears, moving more slowly, and though the guard comes close to their hiding place it is clear they have lost the scent, and they do not linger.

“I wish I’d stolen that ship.” Balthier says in the quiet that follows. “It has a far better engine.”

Fran does not trust her voice enough to reply, not that she would know what to say.

The trip back is at a far more restrained pace, and by the time they arrive at a small, secluded grotto things have been silent for long enough that Fran can remember this is the way it ought to be, on those days her quests are not hijacked by madmen. Balthier leans back from where he has been curled over the controls - they are hovering over a small pond, with a large estate in the middle distance, nothing but the wind to be heard. The stars wheel brilliantly overhead.

“Well, now that we have a fitting place to do this properly - my name is Balthier.” The hume says into the silence, though Fran has heard enough people shouting it in the last quarter-hour to at least be sure of that. “Pirate king of the Strahl. Adventurer, rogue, and finest pilot in all Ivalice. You are?”

“Unimpressed.” No reason to waste the Esuna, his condition obviously incurable, unless she wishes to club him with the bottle.

“Tis an amazingly common name, that.” He settles himself with a bit more deliberation, regarding her, and she has the sudden, terrible suspicion this pretty garden is no accidental choice. “Forgive me for my low manners, but I would be blind not to point out that you are the most exceptionally b-”

Fran takes the spear from his hand and shoves him off the bike in what is all but the same motion, hearing the splash as he hits the pond. Floating well out of his reach, and she has plenty of time to slide into the driver’s seat. Even in the midst of the chaos she’d felt the way he’d moved, pushing his foot forward to urge the machine into motion, leaning his heel down to slow it - not that there was much of that - and as she leans it bends with her, a smooth, slow arc that reveals Balthier in the water below. She had thought he would be furious, splashing and shouting, yet the only sound comes from a few frogs trilling at the water’s edge. A remarkable equanimity for a hume, if he is _not_ , indeed, as mad as a frothing chocobo. Floating placidly on his back, gazing up at her amidst a field of white water lilies,with a rapt, entirely affected adoration that makes her want to drop a rock on him.

“The throttle is the one on your right. Take care not to overclock her.”

Fran’s ears are more than good enough to hear him over the sound of the engine rising to her command. Balthier is laughing.

———————————————

Coincidence is another word that means little to the viera, all things connected in one way or another, even if it may not seem clear at the time. Fortunately, despite their sudden partnership, her name does not become linked to the ‘notorious’ sky pirate Balthier, and she is free to continue in Bhujerba as she pleases. The spear goes back to Eryut, via a trustworthy chain of Moogle connections. It is not penance, or an attempt to connect to what she knows has been rent asunder - it is simply what is right.

Of the pirate, Fran intends only to whet a vague curiosity, and make a few discreet inquiries, though it soon becomes clear this is not a word one can justify when speaking of the man. It is also of note, though perhaps not so surprising, how many of those she asks instantly believe she is a jilted lover, or attempting to collect on a debt. Or both. For every one of the bounties concerning his capture, she is offered several smaller sums to simply administer a good, thorough beating. Twenty gil for one good, swift kick, from a girl who refuses to take no for an answer, or provide her name. “Oh, he’ll know,” is all she will say.

His name truly is Balthier, and he is in turns an idiot, a showman, a thief, a bastard, a hopeless romantic, the luckiest man in Ivalice and simply too stupid to die. Affecting a gentleman’s air and a lunatic’s bravado, he seems to have a rather suicidal penchant for going after Archadian ships and their valuable cargo. The more Fran learns, the more it seems the bounty on his head would be far less high were he not so interested in theatrics, mocking both the Rozarrian magistrates and the Archadian Judges with daringly ridiculous, utterly impractical stunts that are, to a surprising degree, stunningly successful. One of the more common stories details how he had taken possession of an entire docking bay’s worth of spoils from the Alexander herself, including six cases of aged rum, four crates of newly minted rifles and - this part always saved for last - Judge Magister Zargabaath’s toothbrush, lifted directly from his private quarters.

Fran had met Balthier for little more than a handful of moments, but if there is any truth in the tale, she is willing to wager it on the last. A few months pass, and though she hears a few rumors, now that she knows to listen, their paths do not cross again. It means her work is quiet and profitable and there is no mention of a quick-fingered viera in any city’s report. The few thieves there are at her level seem to each prefer a calling card, a way to mark their conquests, though Fran lacks a message to leave behind, or anyone she would wish to take note.

So it is simply another job, working at dusk, and she nimbly works her claws into the masonry of a somewhat small but pretty estate in Balfonheim, with what ought to be a rather valuable diadem in a small study on the third floor, and Fran is as silent as air and unnoticed as a shadow, slipping up the side of the wall and in through an open window - to where Balthier has just snuck in through the outer door, closing it silently behind him. They stare at each other - at least his surprise seems as real as her own, and then he lights up, as if they are visitors to the same party who have just happened to cross paths.

“Fran,” he says, with the same bright, shameless smile, “your name, is it not? I made a few inquiries.”

The wardrobe stands slightly to his left, full of fancy gowns and tall enough to admit an average-sized hume, and really it takes little effort on her part to kick him into it and lock the door before turning back to her prize, the small chest nestled amidst a few other treasures on the far table. Fran has not yet reached it when she hears the sound of muffled thumping behind her, though both past experience and tales told suggest Balthier has had plenty of experience untangling himself from women’s clothing.

“You have admirable reflexes, Fran. May I call you Fran? It seems but fair as you know my name and I am locked in a closet.”

His tone is pleasant, conversational. He will ask her about the weather next.

Little surprise the box has not been well hidden, with the wealth of enchantments enscrolled around it. Fran lets out a slow breath, hands hovering just above its surface. Intricate magicks protect the contents, but she has studied these, and there are instincts of the viera that serve rather well for such moments. It sounds as if Balthier has managed to wedge a knife in between the crack of the door and the frame, attempting to lift up the pins that hold the hinges in place.

“Was that your first time aloft? I had heard the Viera are not much for such pursuits, and yet you rode like you were born to it. Some think it is easy, simply being a passenger, but if you don’t lean into the turns at the proper time, it can throw the whole balance off. It requires delicacy, and trust.”

Wind-touched, another word for those who fly higher than they ought, and faster than most would dare, beloved by the capricious, careless spirits of the air. Many in Ivalice follow the same god, and look to Bur-Omisace for their guidance, but there are a thousand other gods and demons twined within and among this world, and those who cannot help but belong first and only to the sky.

A few more careful passes, whispered words, Fran feeling the magicks retreat from the chest like unknotted cords, and then it its but a box, though there is still the matter of a rather substantial lock. Fran slips a lockpick from its usual hiding place in her hair, and hears a ping from behind her, one of the pins falling free from the door.

“Since we have this moment together, I would like to make an offer. Your help, in attaining a particular treasure I have been pursuing. Certainly not the easiest of marks, but I could make it worth your while, regardless of the outcome. You have quite the compliment of skills and,” even through the door, with her back to it, Fran thinks he can sense her skeptical expression. “Did I mention I have an airship?”

All the stories she’s heard suggest he _does_ have some sort of ship, even if it seems the most unlikely of all possibilities. Fran’s ear twitches, some combination of listening and feeling the small vibrations along her fingertips as she attempts to trick the mechanism. It would surely be disaster, to ally with such a hume.

“You’re picking the lock, aren’t you?”

Fran ought to know better. But if she had, would she not still be in Eryut?

“It would probably help if I were quiet.”

A few moments later, and she hears the lock snap open. Balthier seems to be having more difficulty freeing the lower pin, his voice still muffled through the door as she opens the lid on the box.

“What’s it look like? Describe it for me.”

Fran does not have the words. Which is rather like telling the truth, as the box is empty.

A veritable army rushes the door a few moments later, spilling into the room just as Balthier gets the door free from its last hinge, the weight ripping the lock away, falling with a dramatic clatter in what is now an otherwise silent room. Fran can tell from the looks on their faces, they already know Balthier - she would believe it entirely possible he both knows and has managed to anger every single fellow criminal in Ivalice, from two-gil cons to the leaders of entire armies of angry thugs, such as these. Everyone stares at each other, and the box, and at each other once more. Fran, not surprisingly, endures a few extra contemplative stares.

Still perched inside the wardrobe, Balthier lifts his hands in a mild shrug.

“Well, obviously we’re quite innocent.”

The spokesperson for the group - a hume - steps forward. His smile is much less charming.

“Well, obviously we don’t care.”

The brawling starts a few moments later.

————————————————-

“If you examine it in a certain light, this is actually a stroke of luck. We shall have ample opportunity to see how well we work together.”

If Fran were in a position other than tied back-to-back with a lunatic, being lowered into a subterranean cave with no means of escape save through a group of thieves twice as dangerous as the ones currently sending them to their doom, she would feed Balthier his left boot. It had been an embarrassing fight, too many opponents and too little space and when they’d finally gotten a knife to Balthier’s throat Fran had relented, dropping the blade that was now in their care, along with her quiver and bow. One of the humes had made to ‘check’ her for more weapons, but she’d only smiled, baring her teeth just a little, keeping her eyes fixed with his until he’d decided he had elsewhere to be.

It is still unclear to her, if the empty box had been ever intended as bait, or if it is but happy circumstance, that the thieves who’d stumbled upon them as they were stealing what had already been stolen knew where it might be found. Quite possible that one has nothing to do with the other at all. Calling their captors slapdash idea a ‘plan’ would be giving it far too much credit. The cave they are being lowered into rests on a secluded bit of seashore, with an entrance - and a good deal of the cave itself - set to disappear completely at high tide. A gang of well-armed thieves occupies what remains of the area, directly between the exit and where they’re being lowered. The idea is for them to sneak up on these men, steal back the diadem and escape - if only then to be killed by the men who’ve sent them on this little errand.

Of course, getting murdered by the thieves in the cave - who also, unsurprisingly, know of Balthier and have a score to settle - seems perfectly acceptable to their captors, along with drowning or being crushed by loose rocks or any other ignoble death they might chance to stumble over. Fran grimaces, chill saltwater sweeping over the tops of her boots as her feet touch the cave floor, claws instantly working on the ropes that bind them. She’s freed herself and Balthier before they’ve let go of the rope from above, and she steps back as a the light glints off a falling weapon that lands with a clatter, joined after a moment by another. Two short swords of barely adequate make, nothing close to the quality of weapons they’d had taken from them. She can see Balthier make an annoyed grimace as he gives his blade a cursory swing, though his expression improves when he sees her watching.

“It’s not really a proper adventure until something goes wrong. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, everything ought to work in our favor, don’t you think?”

What gods has he bribed, and _how_ , to live this long?

Finding the target is easy, the thieves camp set up on a high plateau, rough canvas tents surrounded by torchlight. Fran can hear the roar of the open ocean past that, the cry of the gulls from the mouth of the cave, down the other side of the hill, and the only way out. Fran is a creature of trees and grass and a cool, green world. The rough stone of this place is barren and lifeless, the echoes of surf and the conversation of the men that fill the dark space already threaten to give her a headache. It does not help that Balthier keeps looking toward the ceiling in a disturbingly calculating sort of way.

“How well do you swim?” He glances over, when she does not reply. “If we wait to do this when the tide is in - well, assuming we aren’t dashed to bits by rocks or drowned by riptides or shot full of arrows first - it would solve the problem of the men waiting outside the cave, I imagine. Perhaps.”

“You are optimistic.”

“It’s the only way we humes get anything accomplished.” Balthier says, and steps backward, out of the very edge of the torchlight and away from what are, as it stands, rather impossible odds. Fran follows, for the lack of a better idea, and once they are out of view and moving back through the dark, sodden catacombs, he snaps his fingers, conjuring a small flame to light the way. It is surprising, a more delicate, demanding spell than she would expect such a man capable of. The cave is surprisingly deep, the sound of water everywhere, no longer just the tide but dripping down from a thousand hidden chambers. All of the path they are walking rests well below the dark tide line on the wall, and the sting of salt from brackish pools of water burns at her nose.

“Ah, there we are. I had wondered why they would make such a place their warren.”

The end of the cavern reveals a massive stone door, easily twice Fran’s height, and decorated with complex runes all along its border. Along its surface lies the image of a woman with four arms poised around her. A goddess, riding the back of a coiled sea serpent, her head turned in profile and her hair wild as she blows on a conch shell, perhaps summoning the winds that swirl around her. Pieces of the door have obviously been blasted away by magic, chips of stone where prybars have been set, but it is clear they’ve had little luck forcing their way inside. Balthier shakes his head, makes a chastising sound under his breath as he runs his free hand over a set of symbols on one side of the door, studying them carefully.

“Illiterate, unmannerly cutpurses, the lot of them. No appreciation for history.”

“Unlike you, of course.”

“Of course.” Balthier smiles. “I am a gentleman adventurer.”

“Such a distinction?” Fran says dryly.

“Generally,” he replies, and leans in close, rising up on his toes to whisper something in the stone ear of the door’s guardian, and steps away at a soft grinding sound, the entire slab sliding free. Balthier turns to her, badly concealing a proud smirk as he gestures her inside with an exaggerated flourish, “it opens doors.”

Fran does not shove him into the wall as she walks by, though it takes a healthy restraint.

As little as she has enjoyed this unexpected detour, there is no denying the antechamber is beautiful, unlike anything she has ever seen. Great care has gone into its construction - it would appear the door had also kept out the sea, the floor and walls dry - high columns carved from the stones towering over them along the right wall, the entire floor tiled in pearlescent stone that seems to glow beneath drifts of pale sand. It was surely important, once, this place, painted frescoes still carrying some hint of ancient color, describing a great battle of the sea, though most of the detail seems to be on what coils and swirls beneath the waves, great many-armed beasts as large or larger than the ships above, enormous schools of fish and what even seem to be whole, multicolored forests, rising up from the ocean’s floor.

Fran hears a wet crunch, turns to see Balthier grimace, wiping his boot against a stone. He has crushed a crab, nearly the same color as the stones, and as she looks over the ground Fran can see a considerable number more coming up out of the sand, perhaps roused by their footsteps, a few quickly gathering to make a meal of their fallen kin.

The statue that stands at the center of the room is either sister or aspect to the woman on the stone door, with her many arms raised high, her body twisted at the waist into that of a sleek fish. She is illuminated by a single shaft of sunlight, spilling down into the very center of the room, bright enough that Balthier has extinguished his own flame. Fran looks up, though it seems little more than a narrow crack in the ceiling, hardly a chance they could climb out even with a proper rope. The light does, however, illuminate the pearls around the throat of the statue, an ornate garland studded here and there with sapphires that match the bracelets around its wrists. Balthier has taken note of them, but she is curious to find that he kneels instead at the base of the statue, carefully withdrawing a scroll, inset into the stone. He unwraps it with surprising care, just enough for a glimpse at the contents before just as cautiously rolling it back up.

“If you’d care to make use of me,” he says, without looking up. “Such beauty has no more business being here than you do.”

Fran rolls her eyes at the cursory flirtation, but he does not waver as she steps up onto his shoulders, swiftly transferring the adornments from the statue’s neck and arms to her own, listening to Balthier curse slightly as one of the more adventurous crabs decides to take particular offense to his fingers.

“Well,” he says as she returns to earth, his eyes once again looking her over, along with the priceless treasures she now wears. So utterly without guile, and entirely incorrigible at the same time, that Fran nearly smiles back, “that does take care of the business of making this profitable. Now we just need a distraction.”

Despite the endless echoes tricking her ears, Fran still hears it coming, feels the approach, her hand around Balthier’s arm and pulling him toward the door. At the last moment, she realizes that the other crabs are scattering as well - fleeing, as the sandy floor explodes upward, a massive claw and a burst of blue fire instantly melting the stone statue into bright drops that hiss against the floor. The crab bears some resemblance to its kin, though it stands nearly the size of the room - and with a single sweep of its claw and an earthshaking roar, breaks through the wall to the cavern beyond.

“Did I mention I’ve always been lucky?” Balthier says, and then they are sprinting back across the cavern, with the creature right at their heels.

In a way, it is rather easy to rush a band of hostile bandits when being chased by an enormous, acid-breathing crab. The man closest to them as they take the summit doesn’t have time to do more than open his mouth to shout before Fran kicks him, hard, relieving him of his pistol and taking swift, careful aim at a bangaa at the other side of camp, catching him in the shoulder. The report from the gunfire gives them away but by then the crab has arrived, hooking one giant pincher over the lip of the embankment to pull itself up, and the thieves are shrieking, darting here and there to find weapons or flee for their lives. A few flashes of weak magic splash against the creature’s armored hide, doing no damage. Fran glances back, but Balthier is no longer behind her, and she can see no sign of him amidst the chaos. A kicked-over lantern quickly ignites the cloth of a tent, and the fire spreads swiftly, shouts of alarm mixing with those of pain, a hume screaming as another burst of the crab’s breath takes his arm to bone at the elbow. By then, Fran is sprinting along the edge of the camp, skidding down the far side and toward the cave’s entrance.

The tide is not yet in, and she is not surprised to see men rushing up - their first set of captors, alerted by the chaos, but Fran is in no mood to be taken lightly and there is room here for a proper brawl. She brings her elbow up with crushing force against the jaw of the bangaa in the lead, spinning him around to take the crossbow bolt meant for her. A sliver of her attention is still taken with searching for Balthier, that perhaps the silly hume had beaten her here - but there is no sign of him, and Fran’s heart sinks. Large hands grab her from behind, and she snaps her head back, hears a crunch and a scream as her helm breaks his nose, and a second punch sends him to the ground. By this time more of the fleeing thieves have arrived, a bloody free-for all at the mouth of the cave, Fran snatching weapons in one breath to kick their owners back into the mob with the next. At least the monstrous crab seems slowed somewhat by the fire, rising up above the flaming ruin of the thieves camp like some grotesque shadow play. Fran is quite pleased, as she sends her next assailant to the sand, to realize the sword she has taken up is her own.

A blade hisses through the air, and Fran leans back, dodging the strike as she turns, driving a hard punch to the ribs of the man who’d intended to take her head, hearing the snap of bone as he falls. All too late Fran sees the bangaa with a crossbow near the mouth of the cave, his bolt aimed straight at her and there is no time to move or duck and Fran thinks of the Wood, of Jote and Mjrn and the green-

The crack of the pistol shot is loud, close at it is, the bolt going wide as the bangaa falls. Fran turns to find Balthier beside her with a smile on his face, the diadem crooked on his head, and she has no doubt he says something he believes to be terribly clever, but the sound is entirely drowned out by another roar from the crab now lumbering down the slope toward them. When he moves toward the entrance she follows, pausing only long enough to snatch her bow away from another set of undeserving hands, slamming him in the face with the grip.

It is not as surprising as it should be to reach sunlight, and see the ship swooping down toward them, Balthier leaping for the side hatch as it opens, reaching a hand out for her. As she reaches back, Fran hears the rumble behind her. Can see it in Balthier’s eyes, that he’s watching the crab burst out of the mouth of the cave and into the sea as her hand closes around his and he pulls her up into the ship. The door lifts up behind them as the airship turns sharply, skimming the surface of the waves and swiftly gaining altitude. Within moments, they are soaring through peaceful skies.

“Kupo?”

“Never better.” Balthier says, gulping for air as he reaches the top of the stairs, collapsing in an utterly undignified heap. Fran sits down with only slightly more grace beside him, head against her knees, breathing a bit hard and, she thinks, letting her fingers trail along a strand of sapphires, likely wearing more in jewels now than her last ten jobs combined. She glances over at a slight sound, two moogles peering out at her curiously from the cockpit.

“Well then,” Balthier says, looking up at her with a satisfied smile, just as he had on Bhujerba, but with the laughter now dancing in his eyes, “welcome aboard.”


	2. Chapter 2

The Strahl is very well appointed, a vessel intended to quarter eight in battle proves quite suitable for a hume, a viera and four moogles as a casual affair. The skyguilds of the moogles are not defined by the boundaries of hume politics, and though they hailed from Archadia, where the ship was apparently stolen, there is little concern of any criminality by association, not for such engineers. All of Balthier’s crew are journeymen bachelors, and apparently it matters little what ship they get their training aboard. Fran does not know the particulars, perhaps there is even greater value in being the crew of a one-of-a kind ‘liberated’ pirate vessel. Balthier has no other crew - a little odd, perhaps, considering his nature. Difficult to play to the crowd when there is no crowd.

It is far from the first contradiction, the suggestion that Balthier is far more than the sum of stories told. All but from the first he defies her expectations, a room fit and ready for her before Fran has finished washing the sea salt from her fur, and Balthier does not speak of payment, nor the slightest hint that she ought join him in his room instead. Only that she may consider the Strahl her home, for as long as she has need of it, and then he leaves her alone. For all his talk of requiring her aid, Balthier seems to have no particular mission in mind, or perhaps is as yet unsure of her loyalty, though he was well content to let her fence the baubles she takes from the cave, and did not question the profits she brings back - he’d given her the diadem to do the same, her beauty likely to gain the higher price.

Odd, the matter-of-fact way he’d said it, and when she’d looked at him expecting the same coy flirtation as ever, there had been no sign. He is unerringly polite, and the longer Fran stays aboard the ship, the more Balthier treats her as a partner, with the same respect and courtesy as the moogles and no sign he had ever thought of her in any other way. He always lets her know when he is going out, where he thinks he will dock next and when he plans to move on, but when they are not working together she is free to do as she will. Even in such close quarters, there is never a question of privacy - he neither asks of her business, nor expects her to tell him.

A fool in public, then, and a gentleman where there is no one to see? Hardly what Fran knows of humes and their usual behavior.

The Strahl is a comfortable ship, and Balthier quite well connected, as any man with his reputation would have to be, but it is the mystery of him, the unending differences between what he ought to be and what he is that keep her aboard. Balthier, who does not hesitate to give her the bounty of a successful day’s work to divvy up, who will risk his neck for the prize without thinking only to hand it off to her without counting. A hume in this rough business who keeps an eye out for scrolls and magicks no matter the price they might fetch. Seemingly interested in any and all rare spellcraft, and he knows a considerable number of specialists in the magickal antiquities, certainly more than any pirate would find necessary simply to offload pilfered artifacts.

Hardly so large a ship, that he could hide himself from her so completely, even if he intended to try. Fran will not intrude, does not seek him out in his room or demand answers from the moogle crew or even pose the odd, leading question, but she can be very patient. Possessed of skills that have allowed her to stalk game silently for miles, never-seen, and she thinks this will not require measures nearly so great. A matter simply of paying attention, of quietly gathering up moments; the way that all that is told of the pirate still leaves an outline, for the true Balthier to fit inside.

———————————————————-

Life may be a stage, as Balthier is all too often happy to remind her, and their actions part of some never-ending play, but Fran still questions the facility of an intermission that finds them both wedged into a space barely suitable for one. The hume is all but sitting in her lap, attempting to study a map by the light coming through the cracks in the dumbwaiter, while she uses all of her strength to hold the rope up and keep them from plummeting back down the shaft.

For the record, this was not part of the plan.

“Nothing ever really goes right when I’m in lace stockings,” Balthier murmurs thoughtfully. He still is in them, mostly because the laced-up boots he is also wearing go practically to the knee, with heels in fair competition for her own, the left one currently jabbing rather irritatingly into her right thigh. At least they have managed to ditch the dress. It was hardly his color. “It went well enough in petticoats that one time, but the stockings are always tricky…”

“Balthier. The map.”

“Yes, of course. It appears that we need to go… up, one more floor. I do apologize.”

Fran bites down on any curses, saving the energy for pulling on the rope as quietly as possible. Balthier assists her with this as best he can, and if she should slap him in the face with her ears now and then, well, it is a very small compartment.

“Here we are then. Now just to… oh.” As if it is a surprise to anyone, when the door is locked from the outside. Fran’s eyes narrow, trying to calculate the proper angle and how they will have to be positioned, so that she might kick it in. It will no doubt alert anyone with working ears, but at this point Fran would rather fight every single person in the city than stay five more minutes with Balthier’s armpit wedged under her kneecap. It is clear that even in this dim light, he can see what she’s thinking.

“I will point out that for that to work, you’ll have to kick _through_ me.”

“Nothing that won’t heal.” Fran says, even though she’s already discarded the plan, just to see him pout. It is more amusing than she thought it would be, teasing this hume, even if both her arms are burning from the strain of holding the rope. Her ears twitch at the sound of footsteps - light, with just the slight scraping of claws. _Moogle_ , she mouths to Balthier, who shrugs and asks the question with his eyes and Fran shrugs back, as they are rather low on better ideas.

“Excuse me,” Balthier says politely, and the footsteps stop in front of the door. No immediate response, but ever the optimist, he pushes boldly forward. “I don’t suppose you might give us a hand.”

If the moogle were unaware of what they were doing, or aware and inclined to stop them, surely there would be screaming and cursing and Fran trying not to give herself rope burn as they plummeted down the shaft. She is bracing herself for just such a future when the soft voice finally speaks.

“Payment in advance, kupo.” Amazing, how they can make the common word into a rather expansive insult, when the mood strikes.

“I see you’ve heard of me.” Balthier says, sliding gil as quickly as he can, one-by-one through the cracks. Fortunately, there is only so much time a servant can dare to stand around in front of a magical coin-granting door, and they are lucky enough that the moogle is dishonest enough to take their money and yet honest enough to flip the latch, and within moments they are standing in the hall, and at least from the waist up two-thirds of them appear to be competent in some form of thievery. Not that’ Balthier’s undergarments aren’t oddly flattering - he is a creature made up of equal parts overconfidence and leg muscles, the latter as insurance for when the former gets him into trouble.

“… can’t _walk_ in these blasted things.” Balthier mutters softly, Fran ignoring him as they continue down the silent hall. Sky piracy is without the same exacting rules as other forms of enterprise, a rather patchwork nature to the way they must keep themselves occupied and the ship aloft. It is, in part, a spite-based industry, and there is a certain niche market for the wealthy to enlist their aid in enacting all kinds of punishments on each other. Lovers against lovers, former wives against former husbands or simply, in this case, two rich men with too much money who wish to irritate each other with petty humiliations. For the coin and the challenge, Balthier has liberated incriminating letters, pilfered trinkets of sentimental value and in some cases has stolen an item only to steal it back again, just as happy to be hired by the target as by his former employer. An absurd business, truly, but it pays well, with no rules against lifting whatever else might catch their eye along the way to their prize.

Not that Fran thinks there will be much of that tonight, even if half the room were melted down into a less ridiculous shape. Their target obviously fancies himself master of the hunt, as evidenced by the many guns and swords lining the walls, and even more so the stuffed and mounted menagerie that covers the walls, spilling down across the floor. A bestiary of Ivalice’s dangerous creatures spread out before them, frozen in positions far more impressive than those Fran would guess they had died in. A charybterix with its wings spread wide, poised as if preparing to swoop down on a coeurl, the beast twisting, reared on its hind legs which are braced on a covering of what appears to be crocodile skin, which would not seem quite so extreme were it not for the rug made of wyrdhare pelts that covers much of the rest of the room.

“… and there are those who say the rich have no sense of humor.” Balthier says, eyes sweeping quickly over all the gilding, feathers and fur, alighting finally on the prize, resting on a high shelf inset in the wall. It is a cup - a stein, Balthier specified - for the tricentennial celebration of the founding of the Republic of Archadia, an event that had taken place only a handful of years before. It is not such a strange custom, in the Wood they do craft special tokens for certain festival days, but Fran cannot help but stare as Balthier brings it down into the light, not quite certain she has ever seen anything so… so…

“Gods save them, it’s exactly as hideous as I remember.” His voice carries a sort of respectful awe, holding the oversized mug gingerly, as if afraid the ugliness might leak on him. It gleams prettily enough, but the patterns and reliefs engraved in its surface seem awkwardly done at best - flowers with wilted, misshapen petals, figures with oddly melted features and limbs that curve at odd angles. All with the expressions of oddly-resigned madmen, though Fran can imagine there would be nothing but an attempt to make the best of it, in a world with trees burnished to misshapen blobs under an equally warped sun that may be a moon or perhaps some kind of low-orbiting livestock.

“You have… seen this before?”

“Not the first one I’ve stolen.” Balthier laughs at her expression. “Indeed, they made _hundreds_ of these things. The real irony is, I believe… ah, yes,” Balthier shakes the grotesque stein, testing its heft, “silver-plated only. Archadia to its core - all show, little substance and even less value.” He continues to tilt it this way and that, obviously searching for any hint that it is less than wholly offensive, and finding little argument. “This is a horror from every possible angle.”

Fran turns away, to look for anything else that might make this worth the effort, listening to Balthier still chatting to himself, studying his prize.

“What on earth is that chocobo doing… well, _someone’s_ got an imagination.”

It seems already to be courting ill fortune, to take anything with her from such a place, and a quick survey of the weapons does not improve Fran’s view - all the swords are ornamental only, overdecorated and therefore valuable, but useless in a way that sets her fur up. No smell of gun oil on any of the pistols or rifles, the odds are they have never been fired - which makes her wonder just who brought in the beasts that surround them, the wyvern coiled and snarling at her with its bright, false eyes. One thing to be a rich man, to display the spoils of one’s own victory, the pelts of what has been hunted fair, but this is simply absurd, in a way that borders on personal insult.

“Fran, I think I may have gone blind.”

Balthier has the lid open, staring into the stein with dismay, but snaps it quickly closed at the sound of voices from the other side of the room, the soft sound of a knob being turned, only the barest of warnings before the door swings open. Fortunately, in such a room as this there are any number of places to hide, and they each duck into an alcove, Balthier tucked behind a pillar, Fran stepping behind some enormous, armored creature she cannot put a name to. The two of them stand on either side of a glass door, a balcony that would have been their escape route, and still might be of use. If she leans back, there is a sliver of space where she can see Balthier, and it is no surprise that he looks all but giddy at the sudden prospect of being found out. As much as he may complain about the risks of the job - mostly to those who might raise the reward a few gil for the embellishment - no one becomes a sky pirate to avoid danger.

“-can’t trust it. The private companies might not be able to compete on the same level, but you don’t have to beg for their damn attention, and it’s a _hell_ of a lot easier to go back on a deal with the worst of them than to break contract with House bloody Solidor.”

Fran risks peeking out from behind her perch, just for a glance. The humes are perhaps at middle age, one of them balding, the other with a thick beard. Nothing of particular interest in either of them, neither with the obvious trademarks of absurdity the room would seem to demand, that she had to admit she was looking for. Fran knows the name Solidor - the Emperor, the leader of the Archadians, though how a single man can lead so many in any real way has never made sense to her. In the Wood, the village leader could speak with anyone, at any time. Fran knew the names of everyone in Eryut, and would see each of them several times through the day. It seems impossible that a man might lead those he does not know and cannot name, that anyone who could not speak directly to their leader would still have reason to listen to him, yet it is this way all throughout Ivalice.

“Make any argument you want, but the fact is the Draklor Laboratories get results, regardless of _how_ they get them, and I’m not going to wait for the price on those engines to double before I lock in. Who knows, we might see a bid on open market Nethicite in our lifetime. Every man from here to Rozarria is falling all over themselves for a piece of that rock they’ve dreamed up, when half of them aren’t even sure it’s real.”

“Are you so certain it is?”

“You saw them test the Shiva, same as I did. Just imagine it, to never risk losing another cargo to some unexpected sinkhole? No more ships scuttled by the Jagd, no more pirates knocking them into dead sky to collect the cargo? Hell, you could save enough in insurance to cover whatever they might charge.”

Fran leans back, shifting out of sight as the man moves down the aisle between their hiding places and - fortune is with them - opens the doors onto the balcony, and the free night air. He has not yet noticed his missing treasure, though with so many gaudy ornaments as distraction, it is not all that surprising, and their luck may yet hold. She hears the creak of what might be a cabinet door from the other side of the room, and has to fight not to grind her teeth. If they should start up drinking, she and Balthier might be left with little to do but stand here for the rest of the night.

“If the Nethicite ever goes public, which it won’t. You forget that Draklor serves the military first, and Vayne Solidor above that, and _he’s_ nothing but a bastard’s bastard with a pet lunatic on a leash.”

The man who’d opened the doors laughs, she can hear him turning away from the night, moving back into the room, and Fran risks another glimpse - his friend is sitting against the desk with his back to them, and if it were her alone she might take the chance. A dozen silent steps would have her to the edge of the balcony, up and over and out of sight before they could even turn around. Balthier is not so much less nimble than she, that it could not be done - and she shifts back slightly to see if he’s already had the same idea.

Except that Balthier is not looking at her, or even at the door, swiftly calculating a way out and how to compensate for a lack of claws. He is staring straight ahead, as if he can see right through the pillar in front of him, to where the men are sitting, and his expression - she has never seen that look on his face before. No hint of excitement, none of his usual coiled potential, a bird poised to leap back into the air. It is not Balthier, not with this bleak, resigned _trapped_ look about him, and for a moment Fran glances around wildly for whatever terrible danger she has missed. He has faced down circumstances far worse than this with a smile - but there is nothing she can see. Nothing that should turn him into such a stranger.

“Mad men are easy enough to control, if you point them at the right target. Draklor’s been doubling cargo output from Archades every year for the last five, and that’s not even looking at what they’ve done for the fleet. Vayne’s as arrogant as his father ever was, no doubt of that, but wouldn’t you be? The Senate still hasn’t found a way to check him, and the Emperor’s _years_ out of the game, and knows it. A damn fool mistake he made, letting that boy get control of the skies as he has, but that’s hardly our concern.”

If it is one of the men who has struck him so, Fran thinks they may soon be running from at least one murder, if not the pair of them. It is a passing concern - if Balthier believes they must die, Fran is willing to trust him in it, has never seen him act in cruelty or haste. But then, would he not have told her of the possibility, long before they’d arrived? He is still staring, it is still anger, and pain, and an old, old wound. Little of such things in the Wood, but Fran had learned to mark them well among those in the outside world. Travelers and vagrants who had been struck in life like a tree cut down to the quick, and yet they had refused to die. What grew back was strong, but ever wearing the mark of that history. She feels the pluck of shame - foolish, prideful viera, to think Balthier too silly for such sorrow.

“You sign on with them and they’ll have you by the balls for the rest of time. They could well conscript your ships, if Rozarria comes to the field.”

“If?” The man chuckles again, and Balthier’s expression wavers, as if a tremor has passed through it, and Fran is trying to get his attention though there is little she can do. At least that she might know his intentions - and how strange, to recognize that she is expecting to, that the absence is so keenly felt. A kinship Fran had shared among so few, even in Eryut: the best of those she had hunted with, that they could chase down the most dangerous beasts with little more than a glance and the slightest gesture, one spirit in two bodies and perfect harmony. It is not a matter of time spent together, or blood ties - it simply is. There is a name for it in her language, but nothing close in the words of humes even if Balthier, impossible Balthier, may now stand among those who so completely know her heart.

“How in hell did you ever get so far, worrying this much? I’ve got nothing they want, and even Vayne doesn’t think this far past the borders of Archades, House name or no. Let them all tear each other into pieces - it will open up the field for us. Play it right, and the scraps from this war will make us all into kings.”

Fran waits for what seems inevitable, but Balthier does not act, does not move, perhaps does not even breathe. It seems the men have come to conclude some business, she can hear the sound of a nib scratching across paper, and though she’d feared they might stay for hours it is a matter of minutes before their business is complete, and fortune grins her subtle, mocking smile - they do not even close the balcony door on their way out. Fran steps out into the silent room, with a caution that has nothing to do with being caught.

“Balthier?”

It takes perhaps three steps for him to clear his hiding place, and by the time he appears he is everything Fran has come to expect, all that she’d believed he was until now. Casting an amused glance toward the door, as if to thank their unknowing hosts, the tankard in one hand and he raises it in a gesture of victory - and if she had not seen otherwise, Fran is sure she would be fooled. He has not been hiding - that look is ever in his eyes, she simply did not understand what it meant.

“Care to see what else they’ve got in that cabinet?” He says, tossing her the key off the desk, and Fran knows it is less that he gives a damn for the brandy and more that it gives him an excuse to rifle through the papers and she very much doubts Balthier is looking for valuables, at least not the kind to be pawned or melted down.

“Did you know those men?”

“Hm? No, not hardly. Low House names, enough to have their share of trinkets - and rivalries, thankfully - but little more.” So many people in the Archadian Empire that even among the most powerful, they must arrange themselves by the narrowest of degrees. “I could see the tips of your ears over the top of your hiding place, you know. I thought they’d have us for sure.”

Fran finds a few bottles of a rare enough vintage, and by the time she is back at the desk Balthier has finished his investigation, nothing to suggest he’s discovered anything valuable, whatever it was he was looking for. If it was not the men that pained him so, it was their conversation, and Fran thinks back on what was said, the most likely source of such concern. Nethicite, perhaps, a word she has heard before in whisper and speculation. A new hume weapon of some kind, as if what they have now is simply not destructive enough, and that on top of the mention of war? It is no small secret, those in Rozarria and Archades each keenly aware of the size and ambition of the other, and this is not the first there has been talk of the possibility of battle, not even from those planning to find profit in it for themselves. Balthier has never been much for talk of such battles, utterly disinterested in matters of honor or glory, but it has never touched him like this, and Fran thinks, as he turns away from the desk, that he may know that she has seen it.

At the very least, he does not look at her, making an approving sound at the bottles she has chosen, before putting them and their hideous prize in a bag across his shoulder. It is a quiet night, and an easy climb down from the balcony, and Fran knows she will not push him. It is not her way, though he is not Mjrn, who would come to her first with any trouble, any pain, and would never think to hide it. Fran can be patient, even though the look in his eyes… and yes, Balthier has come to mean more to her than she had thought possible, and there is little to do for it now.

She drops the last few feet, hitting the ground silently, Balthier only a moment behind, and he missteps slightly, stumbling. Fran reaches out a hand to steady him - and feels him flinch, ever so slightly beneath her grasp. He looks up.

“Fran. I…”

A low, threatening growl comes from the shadows. The extremely close shadows.

“… I do believe they have dogs.”

Amazing how fast a hume can run, even one wearing heels and weighed down by two bottles of fifteen-year-old cognac.

——————————————-

The more there is to add together of Balthier, the less the pieces wish to assemble, this accounting of the mad romantic Fran has come to call partner, and friend. She has seen him claim with no irony that he prefers the quiet life, and not two hours later they will be screaming all engines full across the plains outside a city - any city - while chased by what seems every bounty hunter for a hundred miles. Balthier will state boldly that he is interested only in money, that his is no free service, and yet it will always end with a stammered apology from some grateful, small-town merchant, that they have not the means to repay for whatever service he has ‘accidentally’ rendered, but here is a crate of vegetables or bolts of cloth or something else Balthier will unload elsewhere, for little more than a pittance against the true effort made. He will smile and charm the gratefully weeping mother, after they’ve rescued her daughter from kidnappers, and Fran knows it will not occur to the woman until they are a speck on the horizon, how Balthier had managed to make her forget to offer payment at all - or that her daughter will likely be ruined in finding a husband to live up to the expectations of being saved by a dashing sky pirate.

It had amused him greatly, when she’d pointed it out.

Beneath the constant cover of his well-worn script - the smirking, indifferent pirate - Balthier is self-depracating and self-sacrificing and absurdly kind, and even though most see him for but a few moments Fran cannot understand how anyone is fooled. Nothing less than a hero from a storybook , though unlike the tales it is neither a particularly safe or rewarding profession, and his cocksure stride into the sunset covers a limp on more than one occasion. Balthier is one of the few she has seen who can cast healing spells on himself while wounded - no small task, which makes Fran wonder even more about the scars he does wear.

Of course, he is also a young hume, and in the midst of all his heroing and rescuing there is still plenty of time for him to act in all the ridiculous ways they seem to find so necessary. Fran quickly loses count of the number of times she has found him greeting the morning face down in the center of the ship’s catwalk, wearing the grillwork patten of the floor from chin to eyebrow until nearly noon. Or the occasions he has been ignobly dragged in on the backs of his moogle crew, in varying states of dishevelment and coherence, to be dumped in his bed or the shower, depending on how well he made it through the fight. He will claim, each time, that he had rushed in to defend a lady’s honor, and given that this is Balthier there is no saying he might not be championing the reputation of every drunken woman in Ivalice in his spare time.

The moogles have responded to this, Fran learns, by taking bets on practically everything Balthier does, and she has watched the gil pass back and forth between them based on everything from the prizes they bring back from successful thieving to how many clothes Balthier stumbles in wearing after a night on the town in Balfonheim. The odds change on whether they’re mostly above or below the waist, _and_ if they’re the same as what he was wearing when he left. So it is little surprise, late one night, the Strahl parked in a bay in the north of Nabudis, for Fran to hear laughter and voices shushing each other more loudly than the words they are speaking, as what sounds like a herd of giant tortoises comes stumbling up the stairs. She watches a few gil glint in the air, tossed from one moogle to the other as they walk past her toward their own quarters. The only thing Fran wonders about is what the point spread is for both a redhead and a brunette, and whether it matters or not if they dye.

She is restringing her bow, and keeps to the task as the three revelers topple drunkenly inside, barely keeping on their feet. Balthier has his arms draped around the girls’ shoulders, and there are four bottles of wine between six hands. Laughter echoes off the walls as he murmurs something no doubt inappropriate, and the air is full of tavern smells: smoke and drink and hume sweat. It is not so rare that Balthier will return to the Strahl bearing any number of love marks, with his clothes well-rumpled or perhaps wearing an entirely new set, depending on the bed he has shared and the disposition of his current lover, and if she has the coin to cast at charming rogues. It is far more surprising, that he should bring them back to the ship - Balthier is very protective of the Strahl, and particular about its guests, and so Fran studies the women even as they stare back at her.

“Good gods, Balthier,” the dark-haired woman murmurs, “the hell are you bothering with us for, with this waiting for you at home?”

“Ah, how rude of me.” Balthier straightens up, and stumbles back a half step for the effort, and the fact that his charming smiles have no effect on her has never stopped him from beaming. “Ladies, allow me to introduce you to my partner, Fran. As swift as the west wind, as lovely as the the northern sky. And… well, admirably furred.”

Magnificently drunk. It is quite impressive he is still on his feet, even with the support.

“Did you lose a bet, and they made you take him along?” The dark-haired woman says to Fran, taking a drink from the bottle in her right hand, while Balthier takes the other bottle out of her left. A Rozarrian accent, and a tattoo of a dark bird with its wings spread, wrapped around her arm and up across her bare shoulder. “Or is it common for viera to take pity on those who cannot look after themselves?”

Any sting in her words is negated by the way Balthier is nibbling at her neck, and she lets out a contented sigh, leaning back against him. The other girl still has a hand in Balthier’s short hair, absently stroking, though Fran would guess she has never seen a viera, wide-eyed and momentarily sober with the shock, paying far much more attention to her than anything else.

“My name is Skylark, and my silent partner is Rose.” At least on the even-numbered days, Fran thinks, rather uncharitably, “I apologize for disturbing you, Balthier did not tell us he had found someone who would put up with him for more than a port at a time. She tips the bottle in Fran’s direction, with a welcoming smile. “Of course, you are quite welcome to join us, if you wish.”

After all this time, with no further overtures and barely a flirtation, Fran had simply assumed Balthier did not care for aught but humes, though by the way he chokes on his mouthful of wine and flushes like a schoolboy, looking at her and then quickly away, it seems she may have been mistaken.

“A gracious offer, but I believe I will find the stars fair company for the night.”

As far as Fran is aware, the moogles’ quarters are soundproofed. For their sake, considering the giggles and moans and what sounds like more than one piece of furniture toppling over before she is out the door, she hopes it is true. Hardly any real inconvenience, Fran prefers to sleep outside when it is possible, and any city has its share of private, secluded spaces. She prefers higher perches, though Nabudis has its own particular charms, and it is not long before Fran is guiding a borrowed boat on the light night winds, laying anchor in the waters that surround the whole of the city. The lanterns on the ships around her glow softly, like scattered petals of the city’s greater luminescence, and the moon is bright, full and low - the sort of moon that would mean a festival in Eryut. Fran stretches out on her back, imagines that Jote or Mjrn might be watching it too, perhaps even thinking of her, and she falls asleep to the soft sound of the lake lapping against the hull.

She takes her time returning, the sun well up in the sky and burning off the morning fog, but it is not all that unexpected to step into to the Strahl and find the Rozarrian pirate sipping at some of their more expensive coffee, wearing one of Balthier’s shirts and nothing else, the fabric falling just above mid-thigh. The door to his quarters is half-open, and Fran can hear him snoring, the sleep of those who will deeply regret waking up.

“Pour you a cup?” Skylark says, and does when Fran nods, passing it over with a smile. “Rose is in there too, still. The both of them lazy as cats, I swear.”

A comfortable, almost companionable silence soon surrounds them, not exactly what Fran had expected from the night before, nor the way the woman seems to be studying her. It isn’t exactly intimidating, though perhaps it is not meant to be - if anything, it reminds her of Jote. Quiet and reserved, yet keenly observant and not at all afraid to show it. She is being measured, though by what mark and for what purpose, there is little telling

“You have known Balthier for a long time, then?” Fran breaks the silence, just to see what might come of it.

A smile. A shrug. “As long as any, I suppose. I should apologize again for last night, you probably thought he’d paid for us by the hour. My name’s Skylark, though perhaps I’ve said as much. Rose and I fly ‘My Bonny Bride.’ We’re a merchant vessel, mostly the routes between Balfonheim and eastern Rozarria.”

All pirate ships are officially merchant vessels. The Strahl is three of them, depending on where she is and where she needs to be. Easy enough to assume that if a ship of a certain size takes a line anywhere near the port city, it’s at least a matter of smuggling goods out of Archadia or back in from Rozarria, avoiding the worst of the tariffs and fees.

“We had some rather interesting trouble with our main engine, and then one of the glossair rings decided to… well, it was a very lucky break for us, that our paths crossed here, and Balthier was willing to assist. It seemed but fair to… reward him for services rendered.”

The Strahl has a full complement of skilled mechanics, and yet Balthier is all too ready to handle a good deal of the the work himself, disappearing into the engine room on the lower levels for hours at a time. He goes there to think, he says, and many times it seems he thinks of nothing less than how to alter the entire ship, making it faster or stronger or just simply different. Fran has heard the moogles groan on more than one occasion as Balthier presents them with the plan, some new indulgence for his beloved ship, and Nono, the chief mechanic, often looks but moments away from braining him with the largest wrench in his arsenal.

“I did not know he… assisted other ships.”

“Well, I hadn’t heard about you either, so we’re even.” A friendly enough tone, as she takes another sip of her drink. “He’s a treasure, that fool. I imagine half of us in the sky owe him at least some credit for keeping us there. A natural too, most the time he doesn’t even have to look at the damn engine to know exactly what’s wrong. I wish I didn’t always feel like such a cradle robber, but I suppose an alarming lack of morals has its benefits…”

Fran tips her head slightly, eyes narrowing. It is not always easy to remember how humes age, but the woman is by no means old. She does not intend to be rude, puzzling out the woman’s meaning, but she looks a moment too long and the other pirate catches her watching, recognizes her confusion, and lets out a bark of laughter.

“I will take that as a compliment, viera. Unless…” Skylark smiles. “Wicked boy. He didn’t tell you? How old do you think he is?”

“Five-and-twenty?” Fran says, sure she is off by no more than a year. If not for the woman’s words, she might have guessed higher. Skylark laughs.

“Barely twenty, if a day - and no, I can’t imagine how that makes him such a shipwright, but so it is. Our little prodigy of the skies.”

Once again, all that she thinks she knows of Balthier is turned calmly on its ear. All the ridiculous posturing, the gestures she thought so odd for his age are quite obviously _of_ his age, and it is the thoughtfulness, his strategy and skill that belongs to a man of far more years. How long could he possibly have been living this life, then? Surely it cannot be long. It has always been a question, but now she cannot even begin to put together an answer - and where, then, did the Strahl come from, and how in the world had he come to acquire it?

Skylark is still watching her, very closely, and Fran realizes what this is truly all about.

“You are wondering what my intentions are.”

“I’ve heard many tales of the nobility and grace of your people. The viera may come into our world, but you hew to your own rules, and on the whole they are kinder and far more noble than our own. I hope you will continue to be a… good influence on Balthier, or at least keep him in one piece. We are all rather fond of him.”

The question of exactly why is not always easy to answer, especially as the door creaks open, and Balthier stumbles out of his room blinking blearily, rumpled and unshaven with a sheet wrapped loosely around himself and all the grandeur of some young, disheveled god of poorly thought-out ideas.

“Good morning, my lovely ladies.”

“Afternoon.”

“And a fine one it is!”


	3. Chapter 3

The legendary toothbrush does indeed exist, resting in the bottom of her bathroom cabinet, and no one on board has ever claimed ownership. Perhaps it truly does belong to a Judge Magister. As the second year of her life on the Strahl passes by, Fran has every reason to believe it so.

Despite Balthier’s reputation for an excess of ill-timed bravado, not every job is as risky or fraught with peril as his best-told tales would imply. A fair portion of what they do isn’t even illegal, or at least not interestingly so. Some smuggling, a few escort missions of either people or goods. A sky pirate trustworthy enough to complete a mission without defaulting midway for the highest bidder can be a good avenue to quietly transport what is already in danger of being hijacked, or kidnapped. Balthier has carried diplomats from Rozarria and complex, ancient magicks from Nabradia and treasures to and from any number of private sources, those items that need to be relocated out of the common flow of air traffic. Generally, it is an unnecessary step, a level of redundancy to calm the nerves of extremely cautious clients.

And then there is the day they agree to transport a bride to her wedding, and she falls in undying love with Balthier along the way and refuses to leave the ship when they arrive, much to the chagrin of her groom-to-be and the rest of the wedding party. Most of whom are heavily armed.

The next few hours are made up of very bad plans just as quickly composed as discarded, including Balthier’s insistence that he and Fran are already wed - the girl is quite willing to share - or that he has only a month to live - she is sure her love will see him through - and a considerable amount of his ranting in the cockpit that the next time he redesigns the hull he will remember to add sections he can jettison at will. It all ends rather anticlimactically, when the moogles corner the girl while Balthier is frantically trying to avoid being blasted out of the sky by the mother of the bride. Fran only hears a fraction of their low, urgent conversation, but it ends with the bride-to-be quickly deciding to return to her beau, giving Balthier a wide berth and several alarmed looks on her way out the door.

The moogles refuse to explain themselves. Fran asks if Balthier would like her to bring a belated dowry, and if he ought to provide her with a ring in return. He storms off to spend a few hours in the engine room pretending none of it ever happened.

Fran puts her share of the rewards from those missions that _are_ successful towards her growing collection of spare yet finely-crafted weapons - knives, swords, a few bows, though none are ever quite the match to the one she brought with her from Eryut. Balthier is responsible for much of the other decoration in her quarters, gifts she’ll open the door on now and then to find he has secreted in - a kaleidoscope, a set of cut-paper flags from Bur-Omiasce. A detailed map of the stars, all the hume constellations spread out across a paper sky. Almost from the start, he has kept her well-stocked in fruit, the mundane and the exotic both, whatever he thinks she hasn’t tried - and always at least one pomegranate.

It is gestures like these that keep her from opening the hatch and pitching him to earth on the day they pick up what Balthier assures her is simple cargo, a crate of fair size to be moved from one of Rozarria’s eastern ports through to Rabanastre. Their employer demanded the swiftest route, across Jagd-studded sands, and Balthier is one of those who is skilled enough - rather than desperate or simply stupid - to reach the other side safely. This talent is usually enough to justify a high price, and so Fran thinks little of what they are carrying or why - until a soft scrape catches her attention, and a louder thump, and she and Balthier look at each other, and back to the cargo hold just in time to see one clawed foot smash through the boards containing what they thought was, at the worst, a shipment of unregistered magicite.

It is a drugged chocobo - or was - and by the sheen and sparkle of its feathers and the fact that they’re carrying it unawares Fran can only assume it is a prize bird, worth a great deal. It is also rather surprised to find itself in the skies - surprised, and very, very angry.

The moogles scatter instantly, locking themselves in whatever room they can reach first as the bird pries itself free from the container, claws scraping against the deck and its wings snapping out. Not nearly enough room to present its full fury properly, and so it lets out a murderous scream and charges the cockpit instead. Balthier chokes out a startled curse, pulling the Strahl into a steep, near-vertical climb, though the bird’s claws hook quite well in the grated floor and it still nearly reaches the chair, beak snapping less than a foot from his head before it finally slips, tumbling backward with a garbled cry, a feathered boulder rolling to the aft of the ship and it is only the barest of temporary solutions.

“Well?” Balthier says, leveling out, eyes flicking to the instruments - he maneuvers through the Jagd on some combination of instinct and memory, not the sort of thing that needs testing by homicidal chocobos, though that does not explain exactly why he is looking at her.

“Yes?”

“I thought your people were good with animals?”

“Good enough to know when they do not care to listen.”

Humes have all kinds of misconceptions about viera powers, though it’s obviously more wishful thinking on Balthier’s part than anything that she might save the day. Behind them in the corridor, Fran can hear a screech, the ruffling of feathers as the bird rights itself. The moogles have reappeared and are shoving at the furniture, swiftly unscrewing panels from the walls, all but taking the inside of the Strahl apart as they attempt to construct a makeshift barricade between the cockpit and the unholy terror that all too quickly finds its feet.

It is a contest of speed between the engineers and the bird then, the moogles unhinging a door only to bolt it into place across the end of the hall, dodging the snapping beak as they work, Balthier grimacing at the sound of his lovely ship undergoing such a slapdash transformation - and then the ship hits a pocket of dead Jagd air and Fran nearly slams against the ship’s front window as they lurch forward and plummet out of the sky. The bird and the moogles and everything that hasn’t been tied down hangs momentarily weightless in midair, Balthier cursing sharply above the warning scream of the instruments as he throws his entire body against the column to turn it. The Strahl sways drunkenly from one side to the other, finally straining skyward as the engine splutters and the glossair rings regain their equilibrium. Fran slowly straightens up from where she’d been clinging to the back of her chair, watching the moogles pick themselves up off the ground - and with a hollow, metallic clang, the chocobo spits a doorknob over the barricade and across the deck to land at her feet.

“Open the rear hatch, Fran.”

“That bird is worth more than the both of us together.” She reminds him, and for the moment Balthier is too busy steering to argue, the controls trembling wildly in his hands. The cause of all this insanity is still glaring, bright eyed at them, letting out a near-constant series of angry warks and chirps and trills, scrambling to its feet only to tumble again at another of Balthier’s mad maneuvers.

“You’re lucky it’s not me you’re dealing with, my friend,” Balthier calls out, the ship finally leveling out in a moment of calm skies, though Fran swears she can feel the subtle sway, left and right, as they move around pockets of dangerous nothingness within the mist, “If Fran were not the voice of reason - wait, is that _my_ doorknob?”

He looks back, just long enough to see that the moogles have in fact used his door as their last line of defense, and as if the bird has followed along with his train of thought, it shuffles back a few steps and dives into his room.

“By every god that ever was, get it out! Get it out of there!”

Balthier flails impotently with one hand, unable to leave the controls, while the moogles stare back, not about to risk their own fur for his troubles. The ship lurches again, and Balthier is forced to shift his full attention once again to flying. All his focus, save the part of him now making a low, whining sound to accompany the ripping of fabric, the sound of glass shattering as anything in his quarters that can be destroyed is quickly rent to shreds by vengeful claws. Balthier flinches with each new sound, as if silently adding up the cost, and for all that Fran is fond of him, she is more fond of remaining in one piece, no one willing to do more than listen to the chaos slowly taper off.

“Shoot it.”

“Balthier.”

“Then shoot _me_.”

A horrible sound from the hall, as if someone’s shoved a whole pot roast into the external Mist intake valve, and a slime-covered projectile hurls past them, bouncing off the windshield and leaving a sickly green smear behind. At one point, it had been a boot. The left of Balthier’s favorite set, if Fran had to hazard a guess. The bird stares at them a moment, feathers ruffling, and returns to what remains of Balthier’s room.

“Ah, no. Shooting’s a waste of a perfectly good bird,” he laughs roughly, grinning like a madman, “we’re going to _eat_ it.”

A harsh shriek cuts through the low static of the open com, Jagd patches doing little better for the radio than they do for the ships. The other reason they haven’t been paying too much attention to the skies, until the Rozarrian cruiser slips in behind them.

“Attention, this is a warning to the unmarked ship and her crew! You are traveling in restricted Rozarrian airspace. Identify yourselves or you will be shot down!”

Fran is already throwing herself into her seat, Balthier’s hands tightening on the controls, promising yet another memorable escape. The chocobo lets out another furious screech from inside the cabin, smashing something that is no doubt irreplaceable hard enough to dent the wall.

“At least someone’s enjoying themselves.” Balthier mutters, and tilts the ship into a dive so sharp it might as well be free-fall.

————————————————

In the end - as usual - it is all a bit of a debacle, though not without some gain. Balthier spends what little time there is while dodging their pursuers pondering how best a chocobo might be plucked, stuffed and roasted, and whether Fran might prefer chestnut stuffing or plain. The Rozarrians are ultimately scuttled among the Jagd, their ship damaged but not destroyed, left limping toward the ground. Fran still does not envy them the long march home. The chocobo is delivered unharmed and uneaten to its final destination, and the unexpected egg that it leaves behind in the nest of what had been Balthier’s best shirts pays back for the damages to everything but his pride. Fran watches the moogles briskly establish a new set of wagers, should the situation ever repeat itself, though Balthier shies away from larger cargo in the months that follow, and it is a considerable amount of time before he stops comparing every new bauble to some far superior item lost forever in a chocobo’s gullet.

Life goes on, through eastern Archades and Balfonheim, down past Dalmasca and back up through Nabudis, until even places she’s never lived become strangely familiar. The word Nethicite flickers in and out of the world like a wandering ghost, growing rumor and speculation turning up in this port and that.

If Fran had not been there, the night Balthier became a stranger, perhaps she would not even take notice of it, or how Balthier seems keep track of every new piece of information, even trading the transport of some rare artifact for the price of being able to study it. Still spending much of his time on matters of high myth, what humes consider the earliest days of their history - Raithwall, the Sun Cryst, the Midlight Shard. He speaks to her of none of of his findings, or the purpose behind his interest. Fran has thought to ask him more than once, but there is a sadness in Balthier’s eyes when he is lost in those contemplations, a desolation that always keeps her silent.

Fortunately, they are but brief mentions, scattered and forgotten amidst better days. Adventures that often end with the sun slipping beneath the horizon, the two of them riding tandem, Fran’s legs tucked up against Balthier’s own, leaning against his back, arms around his waist as he flies whatever has caught his fancy long enough to steal it away. He smells of sun-warmed leather and hume and though Fran has never regretted her choice to leave Eryut, she finds she is more now than simply satisfied, more than content.

Balthier makes her happy - the kind of happiness she knows now that she’d been hoping to discover, what she’d left the Wood for, not even knowing if it existed or how she might find it.

The night comes, then, when they have had yet another successful adventure and a bit too much wine, and when Balthier’s arm snakes around her waist, it is entirely in camaraderie, simply one drunken friend propping up another. Fran wonders why that is what finally tips the balance, knowing his touch is completely innocent, to convince her of what she has been pondering ever since that night when the thought of bedding her made him blush and look away.

When they arrive at the Strahl, Fran nudges him gently to one side, up against the hull, and before Balthier can quite right himself, assuming she’d simply bumped into him, she lifts a hand to his cheek, leans in and kisses him deeply. Balthier tenses under her touch, and she draws away to see a look of surprise and dumb shock that is far more pleasing to her than his usual smooth chivalry, though his hands do slide up against her arms, a tentative, questioning sort of caress. Slowly, his fingertips catch beneath the edges of her sleeves, sliding down to trace the curves of her arm guards with amusing trepidation.

“…Fran?”

“Balthier.” Fran smirks, and leans in for another kiss, though his hands tighten on her arms just before she can reach his mouth again.

“I… this… I mean, you are certain?”

As if she does not know her mind. Fran smiles against his lips, kisses him once, and twice - and then he is finally kissing her back, though there is little in it that speaks to the carefree pirate, the charming rogue. He touches her the way he holds the rarest scrolls, the most ancient tomes, care and reverence and what may even be a little awe. So serious, and she is surprised and pleased that it is her turn to play the fool, to have her way with this delightful hume. Balthier. Her Balthier, and Fran is a siren of a strange, cloud-strewn sea, this handsome sailor gathered up in her charms.

He looks very young in the dark, his eyes wide when she draws herself up over him, and his hands are not so sure and his mouth is not so clever. At first.

The morning finds them drowsing together, her leg thrown over his, tucked cozy against his side, one of his hands tangled in her hair, the other lightly stroking the top of her thigh. Such laziness is not, she knows, a luxury Balthier can always indulge in, often arriving on the Strahl in some varying state of half-dressed shambles. Usually with some evidence of leaping out a window, or otherwise dodging the startled fury of an unsuspecting brother, father or paramour. The shirt he’d left crumpled near the door is but half-embroidered, pretty enough that it appears to be a deliberate asymmetry, but Fran knows that the girl was only half-finished with the gift when her husband had come home early to find a naked pirate in his marriage bed.

It is the first opportunity Fran has had to study Balthier’s own quarters, little privacy to be had aboard ship and no need to impose, until she had been so pleasantly invited to intrude upon it. She recognizes various baubles and trinkets from jobs they have done, items he has yet to fence or preferred to keep, and random gifts received, all piled haphazardly around the room. Some of them are stacked high enough to nearly touch the various holstered weapons and mechanics’ tools that dangle down from the ceiling, tossed over the crossbeams. Balthier has a considerable number of scrolls, and even more books, also piled on any surface that might hold the weight. A large map of Ivalice covers much of the wall opposite the bed, with smaller pictures tacked here and there upon it, and what looks like hand-written notes on top of those, scribbled out on scraps of parchment. Worthy of a closer look, though for the moment Fran is feeling warm and lazy and prefers to examine Balthier instead, tracing the scar on his collarbone, the star-shaped mark she’d noticed the first that they’d met. He smiles when he notices her attention.

“It does give the girls something to aim for.”

As if it had not been her own mouth mapping those marks the night before, feeling him arch and groan at the brush of her tongue, the gentle scraping of her claws. His fingertips stroke the fur at her throat with no small care, and she sighs, rolling onto her back as she stretches, enjoying the feel of his warm hand sliding across her stomach.

”Fran, you are every word any poet ever wrote about beauty.”

“You said that about the last upgrade for the Strahl.”

“Did I now?” He smiles, and then it fades as looks into her eyes, and away. “I, this, you and I… I do not wish…”

“You will be out chasing hume girls before the sun has set, Balthier,” she says, and puts a finger to his lips before he can protest, “and I would have it so. I will not have this be a chain between us, for you or I.”

He takes her hand, pulls it away from his mouth only to bring her knuckles back to his lips, a gentleman’s formal gesture.

“Yet I fear you will ever be first in my heart.”

It is pure pirate, a knave’s seduction, but this is Balthier, and as Fran draws him in for a less polite kiss, she knows he is entirely in earnest. She also wonders what bets the moogles have been making over this.

“Fran,” he murmurs when they part again, staring into her eyes once more. So earnest, her lovely hume, and more solemn than she had ever thought possible. “If I… you must know that, whatever happens, the Strahl will be yours. Always, until you no longer have need of her.”

It is near to what he’d said when he’d brought her aboard, but this is not that, not anymore. It means far more than even being together now, with her body against his, faces a bare handsbreath apart - the ship is hers, should he fall to some ill fate, as the bow Fran carries had been handed down to her, its former owner long past hunting, a final gift before she’d gone to walk the next path. The only feeling more profound than her amazement at his gesture is the fear for why Balthier might choose to make it.

——————————————

As Fran waits for the Archadian solider to arrest her, she ponders blaming Balthier for turning her perilously soft-hearted, but cannot claim it true. Seized by a ridiculous impulse, that much was sure, but the hume thief had been little more than a child, and so terrified when Fran had stumbled over him that he’d tripped the alarm in his nervousness. The punishment would be far greater for him than for herself, were he caught, and so Fran had let him run, had taken the treasure and gone in the opposite direction, what would insure his escape at the cost of her own.

Now, it will simply be a matter of breaking free of her captors and finding another way out, hopefully before Balthier decides to move on. It has been no small time they have been partners, but she has never done anything quite so foolish before, and cannot truly expect him to wait for her. Balthier will surely expect that she can simply find him again in the next port, though it will be annoying to do so, and he will tease her for it.

It had been an obvious lure to any enterprising pirate - the ‘Lament of Landis’, a set of gemstones that had been a part of the royal jewels, torn from their settings and scattered like the pride of that former republic, being shipped through a small Archadian port, on their way to some private owner in the north. Fran wondered, as she listened to the sound of armored footsteps hurrying to meet her, if the boy had been the son of some duke or knight, had come up with this plan as a way to win back some lost honor for a homeland he had never known. It is not her history, she sees little more than gil to be had, but even if she knew the whole of it Fran would not think such trinkets a proper trade for a boy’s life.

A handful of stones that might carry the weight of a world within their facets - and for a moment she is not thinking of Landis at all.

A single soldier finally charges around the corner, only to come to an abrupt halt at the sight of her, and Fran knows that despite the cost in pride it is the right decision to stay. The boy may have been killed on the spot - Archadian law allows Judges to pass swift sentences for thieves - but she is a viera, not at all who the guard expected to find, and as he stares Fran straightens up to her full height, giving him her best imperious gaze. When he does not move, she holds out the bag of gems, listening to more clanking down the hall - the men who may have been looking for the boy now focused on her. If she knew the child had yet escaped, it might be worth trying to run… but now that she is here, and it is clear these men are loathe to attack, she may as well give him all the time she can.

The guard raises his sword in what seems to be a vaguely threatening motion, obviously hoping she won’t call him on it, and gingerly takes the bag from her. The other soldiers have halted a good distance away, unwilling to come any closer. It seems they may have never seen anyone like her before. Fran keeps her expression cold and impassive, though it is difficult not to smile at the sound of metal plates shifting in nervous confusion.

“I… ah…. you’ll - you’ll have to come with me.”

It is a question, not an order, and Fran is half-tempted to say no, just to see what he’ll do. Instead, she nods, and follows the guard out of the treasury vaults and through a short stretch of corridors, into the guardhouse proper. The rest of the men peel away well before they arrive at the guard captain’s station, not at all wanting to be involved in this, and before long he and Fran arrive in front of a nondescript desk and an equally nondescript man, who looks from Fran to the soldier and back again, and seems in no hurry to hand out medals for valor.

“What have you done?”

“I caught this… uh her, Sir. Er, she was attempting to steal the… um… valuables. From the vault. Sir.”

The guard captain looks at Fran again, and she returns his gaze with serene indifference.

“Does she speak?”

“I don’t… believe so?”

A glance at her, one eyebrow raised, but Fran sees no reason to respond. Instead, she lifts her gaze to the edge of the wall, a small window, the wooden beams of the ceiling. It is a sturdy building, not particularly new or well-constructed, and the cells may have some weak points to favor an escape.

“You’ve brought me a viera, soldier. You know that, don’t you?”

“Sir.”

“A viera who is not an Archadian citizen. Or _anywhere else_ , as far as I’m aware. What do you suggest we do with her?”

Maybe Fran will not even have to plan her escape. The guard captain might be amenable to simply closing his eyes as long as she agrees not to be there when he opens them.

“So we - I mean, sir, there are still - we can’t have… people… and such just breaking the rules. I mean, she was _stealing_. What about moogle law?”

“Does that look like a moogle to you?” The guard captain sighs. “You just _had_ to bring her back to me.” He pinches the bridge of his nose with one hand and waves them off with the other. “Put her in a cell for now. I’ll… consider my options.”

The guard marches her away, the captain muttering to himself so quietly not even Fran can make out the words, though she doubts it has much to do with options. It seems the clouds she had noticed earlier in the day have indeed turned into the rain they promised, a fierce storm that even sweeps a few drops between the bars of the high window of her prison cell, and there’s little point in escaping into weather so dismal. It might even be enough to keep the Strahl grounded until she can escape.

The room is small, little more than a low pallet and a bucket, but large enough that Fran can stretch out on her back, hands behind her head and wishing she’d brought something along to read. It is worth remembering, for the next time she decides to play the idiot hero.

Behind her, she can hear light clanking, and tips her head back to see the guard staring, though he stumbles out of view when she looks. A second soldier - she can tell he is different by the sound of his tread - walks by slowly, and then a third. It seems this small outpost is now fully aware of her presence, and no one has anything better to do than come sneak a look. A spare blanket is slid without comment between the bars, worn but clean and soft. They ask if she needs anything to eat, and when she does not answer the guards talk quietly amongst themselves where they do not think she can hear, about how she might suffer in such a cell, and if creatures such as she is need open spaces to survive.

Obviously, if she but coughs a bit, Fran will be out of here before nightfall.

With little else to do, it is not surprising that her thoughts cant in Balthier’s direction, and for more than just how insufferable he will be when he discovers her imprisonment. Fran does wonder where he spent his early days, cannot imagine it is any town as small as this. At first, she had not even been sure he was Archadian, enough smugglers and pirates who enjoyed affecting the accent, though since then she has heard him speak too often, in joy and anger and passion, to doubt it further.

It seems most likely that Balthier is a gentleman’s bastard, perhaps fallen out of favor with the family. The child of a wealthy mistress, or the product of an illicit affair. It would explain a good deal, including his diction and his trade. Allowed a proper Archadian education by the blessing of some patron who was not quite ‘father,’ and then the chance at a position where the Strahl would be within reach, his for the taking. Had Balthier run purely for the chance at making the ship his? Or had there been some ugly maneuvering for power that had left him in the cold? Maybe this was some act of rebellion, proving a point, and after a time he even expected to return to the home he had cast aside.

What of the scrolls then, and the Nethicite, this silent search for answers he does not speak of? Every day there are more whispers, rumors that pass from ship to ship, an ill wind circulating through the ports - Rozarria and Archades have once again taken notice of each other, two sleipnir pawing the same ground, preparing to charge. So far it has been but small skirmishes, posed as little more than misunderstandings, but it takes such great Empires a good deal of time to rouse themselves in earnest, to push in earnest toward a goal, an enemy - war. If Nethicite cannot truly tip the balance in favor of those who possess it, the simple fact of its existence may be enough to rally men, out of confidence or fear, to convince them of the need to strike. The long-standing myth, the rumor is that Raithwall himself left behind protections, great weapons for his favored nations, those that a capricious fate has placed directly between Rozarria and Archades. For their sake, Fran hopes it is true.

“It’s a bloody waste of time, protecting some rich bastard’s trinkets like we’re hired hands. Let her take the damn things for all the difference it makes.”

The conversation is quiet, down at the end of the hall, but easy enough to pick out over the muted hush of the rain, now little more than a patter.

“Captain says there’s a pack of bangaa coming in on a flyby, and they say that she’s got some marks outstanding. We’ll hand her over to them if it’s true. No paperwork that way, like she was never here at all.”

Fran’s left ear twitches slightly, the only sign of her displeasure. It seems that luck and chance will not be satisfied until she gives them some proper entertainment.

“We’re really just going to give her to those lizards?”

“If she’s as good as they say, I think she can handle herself. Better a few bounty hunters than an Imperial record, anyway.”

It’s true enough, though Fran does not trust her luck that these are not a very particular group of bangaa, working under the banner of a rather nasty leader. His name is Ba’Gamnan, and he seems intent on capturing Balthier past what even a hefty prize would make worth the effort. It is a personal vendetta, and though hardly surprising that he could inspire such virulent ire, Balthier swears he cannot remember which of his many, many sins the bounty hunter and his fellows might be haunting him over.

Escaping before they arrive is now a matter of some urgency - she will not risk being the bait to lure him into danger. Fran’s eyes narrow, the only sign of any rising tension. The question is only of which plan might bring the fewest guards while insuring they will still open the door. Once she is free of the cell, Fran has little worry of outrunning her pursuers, even if she has but a sketchy notion of the best route out. If only there were a way to take the gems with her as she fled…

“Who’s in charge here?!”

A booming voice shatters the relative calm, and Fran can hear the clank of armor, every man jumping to attention as a brisk stride moves down the corridor, the steady shift of armor in stride with the clattering counterpoint of a soldier trying desperately to keep up.

“I’m sorry, sir. We weren’t expecting… there was no notice that you…”

“No, there wasn’t.”

The clamor comes to a sudden halt in front of her cell, and Fran wonders if perhaps she has done fortune some grave disservice, that bounty hunters should not be considered enough of a goad and a Judge has been put in their place. The armor is well worn but his status is apparent, marks of his rank slipping out of what is marked on the metal and into each sharp motion he makes, the booming echo of his voice behind the faceplate.

“By the gods, man. You haven’t got her in chains?” He rounds on the guard, who quite obviously wishes to be anywhere else. “This creature may look a beautiful vision of womanly perfection, but beneath that silky fur lies a terrible, rage-filled demon that would tear you limb from limb! You cannot imagine the depths of her depraved arts, her seductive enchantments! When she was through with you, she’d devour your soul and you would thank her for the privilege!”

Fran is standing now, a little bit closer to the bars, uncertain whether to be impressed, amused or insulted. It seems this fool Judge has mistaken her for some sort of furry succubus, or perhaps a Marlboro in high heels.

“S-sorry sir. We - we didn’t know, sir. We’ve never had one of her kind here, before.”

“Obviously not,” and the Judge turns back to the cell, lifting his faceplate with one thumb - and Balthier winks at her, grinning madly before he lets the visor fall, leaving Fran to gape in silent shock even though she should know better than to encourage him.

“I will require her weapons, and the goods she attempted to steal. We shall need to make a full report of this back in Archades.”

He can’t possibly get away with this. Surely the charade won’t last long, armor or no, though there is nothing for Fran to do but go along with it and hope that when it all falls apart she is in a better position to help. The soldier gingerly opens the door and Fran allows Balthier to snap her into manacles, leading her out of the cell. The rest of the guard keep a nervous distance as he continues to weave fantastic tales of her unholy rampages, entire ships full of unfortunate souls falling to her lethal charms.

“I suppose, though, they mostly died happy,” he muses, and it takes all her power not to see how much of his armor she can kick him out of, chains or no.

Entering the captain’s office ought to be the end of the charade, but Fran watches quietly as Balthier signs off on all the paperwork with a lazy indifference, as if he actually knows what he is doing. Even more staggering is that it _works_. He exchanges a bit of pointless conversation with the captain and then they are walking out the front door, her chained arm in his left hand and the ‘Lament of Landis’ in his right, well secure in a pouch they have provided for him to insure its safe voyage.

“Why so shy? I hear women like a man in uniform,” he says breezily, and then in a quieter tone, meant only for her ears. “We’ll take the transport I borrowed to get here. I promised the moogles I’d let them strip it for parts.”

“… seductive enchantments?”

“I had to make it sound convincing.” How a muffled voice can still sound so insufferably pleased with itself is beyond her. “We really ought to have you get captured more often. It’s far easier than all this sneaking around.”

Fran does kick him, then. What is lost in speed is made up for by the weight of the manacles, and she isn’t sure whether the clang of metal against his armored leg or Balthier’s muffled yelp is the more satisfying sound. He frees her as soon as they are out of sight, and then they are moving to rejoin the Strahl, the ship tucked away in a makeshift hideout and the moogles ready and waiting, wrenches drawn even as they touch down.

It is not the oddest of late lunches, picnicking in the cockpit as the crew breaks down their prize, with Balthier sweeping his way across the radio bands, determined to find the conversation he does eventually stumble over, an increasingly loud discussion between a rather nasty sounding pack of bangaa and an increasingly unfriendly Archadian outpost that, finally, refuses to let them even land.

Balthier nearly laughs himself out of his chair at that, still chuckling well into the evening, as what is left of the sun stretches out along the top of the clouds in a bar of molten steel, the Strahl hovering quietly as the peach-tinted light fades into a star-strewn sky. They will set the ship down after a while, but such glorious vistas are one of the greater perks of piracy, and no one is in much of a hurry.

Balthier is stretched out next to her on the bed, his head near her feet, alternately flipping through a badly dog-eared book of dubious quality - as if he doesn’t have enough daring rescues and blushing maidens in his diet already - and letting his hand trace just past the very tops of her boots. He seems to enjoy studying the boundary between her armor and fur, as well as testing his luck; if she is more amused by his wild embroidering of her reputation or is just biding her time before smothering him with a pillow. Or perhaps, inspired by his suggestions, simply killing him with her thighs.

“You have worn far more ridiculous disguises,” Fran says, gazing at the armor now piled haphazardly in a corner of the room, props discarded once the scene had changed, “though I do not think it suits you.”

“Quite the compliment,” Balthier says with a smile, “although I suppose it is the point of such things. Dignity and authority instantly bestowed, no matter what fool may be clanking about inside.”

It was one thing to shed the suit so carelessly, but Balthier had brought a blade with him as well. One she has never seen before, and though he’d frowned when she took it from him Fran could not allow such a weapon to be merely tossed aside. Now, she has drawn it from the scabbard, studying it with care.

The blade is elegant and finely-crafted, equal or better than any sword she has seen him carry, though Fran can see why Balthier would refrain from wielding such a conspicuous weapon, every inch of it undeniably Archadian. A line of ancient Kildean is engraved along the length of the steel, Archadia fancying themselves as both warriors and scholars, and they use the old language often in their adornments. It is perhaps a fragment of a poem on the glory and honor of battle, or service to one’s nation.

The pommel is intricately inlaid with red stone that accents the various metals braided into the grip, rich shades of copper and gold. A crest has been set into the side of the blade, just above the guard and before the inscription begins: an ixion rearing on its hind legs, mane swept back and hooves kicking the air, encircled by a narrow banner. It is a detail too small for any proper inscription, though Fran has seen such things before among their estates - this is not only the sword of a Judge, but one of noble origin, and this is the crest of his House.

“It is no simple guard’s weapon. Do all Judges carry such fine blades?”

“Finer, if they can afford them, but this sword is not…” Balthier pauses, just slightly too long to be collecting his thoughts. Fran says nothing into the silence, does not shift on the bed or make note of how he has gone tense and still, that he is no longer touching her. It is one thing, to walk around in a stolen suit of armor. It is another, to do it so well, that neither the common soldiers or even the captain would ever think to question him. “The Akademy gives out but one a year, to the student at the top of their class. The soldier who seems most likely to bring the greatest triumph to the Empire.”

“It seems one would be loathe to part with such a gift.” Fran says, and knows she is pushing him, as much as she ever has, and that it is not fair to do this in his quarters, the place he should have been able to escape to. It is surely no longer a matter of not trusting her, of not knowing her - Balthier is ashamed now, and afraid of her judgment, and Fran wants very badly to take this blade to whoever has dared to hurt him so.

“The man it belonged to no longer had need of it.”

“… was it your father’s sword?”

He laughs, a sound as bitter as it is surprised. “My father? Ah, my father…” Balthier chuckles, and the sound is painful, as he rubs his hands over his face as if to wipe away all trace of emotion. “No. My father could no more swing a sword than he could teach a chocobo to waltz - and he surely would have tried the latter first.”

Archadia worships the might of its army as Rozarria does its skill in trade, and there are few who rise to any level of power or status outside of the ranks of the military. If Balthier is not a wealthy lord’s bastard, then perhaps he is one who sought to raise the family name out of ignominy. A man who charted his own path through their demands, had perhaps found honor and privilege but obviously not the acceptance he sought. Fran reaches out, stroking the shirt above one of the more impressive of Balthier’s scars.

“You were very young, for such a life.”

“I showed… potential.” He looks to the ceiling, not to her. “In training, we weren’t allowed to heal ourselves, or each other. Not until it had a proper chance to leave a mark. If you dared to try, they’d give you twice as many for your trouble. Or your own squad would. It was something to be proud of. It built character.” Balthier sighs. “I never developed the taste for character.”

It is a difficult world for those of conscience. It is the evil Jote spoke of, all that the Wood seeks to protect the Viera from, that the sword Fran holds in her hand can be given to all kinds of humes for so many reasons, and so many different forms of triumph. Certainly there are good men in Archadia, as there are throughout Ivalice, but the right path is not always clear, and there are always those who benefit from taking other roads, and leading their men to choose the same. The same boldness, the same strength would have been in Balthier the soldier, as it is in Balthier the pirate, and how much worse the betrayal, to learn that swearing oaths to the highest virtues did not always mean doing what was right? How long to fight that fight alone, before it made more sense to simply _be_ alone?

However many men have been granted this sword, Fran is certain why Balthier received his. “You were a brave leader, and it was their good fortune to know you.”

“I was… something. It hardly matters now, if it even mattered then.”

No wonder they understand each other so well. Balthier is as much an exile from his world as she is from her own, and that it has been their choice does not lighten the weight of memories, or lessen the cost.


	4. Chapter 4

If one is going to steal from the Royal Palace of Rabanastre, there are few better times than the day of a royal wedding. The streets and pavilions are all crowded with revelers, the long and peaceful reign of King Raminas inspiring even the guard to be more interested in enjoying themselves than paying close attention to their duties. A swish of dresses passes above, bright laughter from the balcony, scattering a few of the petals that had been tossed from every balcony as the Prince of Nabradia and the Princess of Dalmasca had followed their long procession to the altar, to vows of marriage and an unshakable alliance between their kingdoms. Fran watches the small, white blossoms scatter in a false snowfall, as close as any here will see of it.

“The bounty on your head has been raised by another thousand gil,” Krjn says, “Any higher, and I shall consider taking the hunt on myself.”

It is a joke, though most would miss it, her calm tone as inscrutable as ever. It is much more than pleasant to speak with kin and kind, though Krjn had been a solitary hunter long before Fran had left the Wood, and even now it seems she has rarely looked back.

The Viera make a point to keep in touch wherever they might be, a sisterhood of travelers, of chosen exiles, and nearly all of them known to her. It is still passing strange when Balthier should set down in some familiar port and she should see a new face, a viera fresh into the world outside the Wood. Balthier, true to form, is quick to offer them passage aboard the Strahl, and whatever answers he can provide, but he is just as quick to leave them be, that Fran may keep counsel with her own kind. Balthier is dear to her, and in many ways he has a viera’s own patience, but it is soothing in its own way to walk quietly with those who remember the same home that she does.

Krjn is not the only viera in Rabanastre. It had been startling to see Ajra appear, one of Mjrn’s own friends, and though there was no reason to think she could not choose to leave - not as young as she seems, not after the years Fran has spent in the world - it was unsettling, still. Fran did not ask, but Ajra offered what she knew, though the Wood was of course unchanging, everlasting, and it was no surprise there had been little difference in all the years she has been gone. It seemed Jote had taken on all responsibilities as leader, and if she was a bit more somber, and Mjrn a bit more quiet - well, Fran feels the pang of missing them, as they surely miss her.

With all the time that has passed, it is still easy as breathing to remember the sound of Jote singing in the twilight hours, or Mjrn laughing as she chased Fran through the trees, in that stillness, the green-and-gold dappled peace that rests forever now, just out of reach. It is guilt and it is longing. It is not regret.

“I have heard of troubles in the North.” Krjn says, stepping into the shadow of an archway, the cheers of the crowd echoing off the stones. A rich man is scattering gil coins, children laughing as they scramble in the dust. “Nabradia speaks of closing its borders. It is said their king has had meetings with Rozarrian ambassadors.”

Fran nods slightly. She has heard all of this, and more. The skies are always full of chatter, rumor and speculation, but the steady stream has turned into a great torrent, those who move among the clouds realizing what those far below are only beginning to consider. War is coming, all but inevitable, and Nabradia stands fixed as the rock for Archadia to break upon. It is is a happy day in Rabanastre, the beloved princess and her noble, gallant beau, but there is no denying this marriage is far more than the joining of two long betrothed. Dalmasca will stand with Nabradia, will cast their fates as a single stone into the water. It had been Balthier to call it so, and quietly, his eyes fixed on the far horizon. She finds his gaze more often there than not, as if searching for a sign of what is to come.

A line of moogles marches past them, moving toward the palace, and Fran looks down at the last of these as he trips slightly, and looks up at her. Dressed in the bright colors of performers, and though many humes claim great difficulty in telling them apart, Fran does not share the problem, and this moogle has a distinctive notch in his left wing, regardless. A group of annoyingly skilled thieves who had stolen a rather choice scepter right out from under them in upper Rozarria, though there is little she can do about it now. It would be poor manners and worse sportsmanship to raise trouble, not to mention drawing far too much attention to herself. He lifts claws to brow to salute her, but quickly scuttles away when he sees Krjn watching. It is no surprise that they are not the only ones to take advantage of the crowds and celebration, though Fran thinks theirs is by far the most ambitious and foolhardy gambit. As usual.

“Nabradia is not the only one, they say, who seeks out new allegiances.”

It feels strange to step back into the hot sun, the desert wind stirring the sand at her feet. Fran has never quite grown accustomed to Dalmasca’s extremes. It is just as strange to walk with one of her own, and speak of politics as if they have some greater meaning. At times it seems all the humes know how to do is fight, and the richest and most powerful among them seem the most eager to struggle for more.

“Bhujerba will not openly defy the Empire.”

Krjn raises a brow. “Is this the opinion of your pilot, then?”

It is known among the viera, that Fran has taken a hume as her partner, and if Balthier has noticed the weight of such a judgment skewing entirely in her favor, it has only made him smile. Worse things in this world, he says, than being a kept man.

An amusement that has faltered as of late, ever since the wedding had been announced, and Balthier had declared his intent on the palace vaults. His time as a Judge was brief, and it had not taken long before the hypocrisy of his duties had overcome the patriotism of youth. The Strahl had been his first grand prize, and with its theft he had cut all ties to his homeland irrevocably. Still, Balthier remains Archadian from birth, and he is grimly certain about the Empire’s designs, and the motives of those with the strength to oppose them. Ondore would see no profit in interceding, and his ties to Rabanastre are merely shadows compared to the weight of Imperial coffers. If he does make a move, it will be only to turn a profit with Rozarria, and Dalmasca and Nabradia would still stand in between.

“I have no reason to doubt him.” Fran says, nose twitching as a plume of smoke drifts by, carrying the scent of well-spiced meat. It is difficult to imagine such a lively, peaceful city as this might come to harm, though the long histories of humes seems to consist of little else. “If there is danger, I would come for you, would you wish it.”

Krjn lets out a soft laugh. “Rabanastre is my home, and I will remain here, for good or ill. As I have heard it, your ship may not be the safer place.”

It is true, though the Strahl is where Fran belongs, and she has followed Balthier into folly often enough to think she will do aught else now.

The conversation takes a gentler, more festive bend, as Fran shows Krjn the book that had been at the start of all of this, what has now become a chronicle of her adventures, even a few sketches she has added to the remaining blank pages, though she has not the same talent as its former owner. He had been here once, the royal palace taken down in the same careful pen strokes as all else, and Fran wishes he could stand here now, to see the city dressed for celebration. Balthier had noticed her keepsake long ago, had decided the writing was surely Rozarrian, though even learning the words scattered across the pages had not given her any clues to its origin. He had said he would keep an ear out for any word of a missing adventurer, and though it has been many years, if anyone can find a clue it will be Balthier. He has a knack, picking up all kinds of information wherever he might be.

As he is at this moment, standing among the revelers in one of the palace’s outer courtyards, or more specifically leaning on a pillar, speaking to a girl who, despite her youth and her giggling looks all the world like a coeurl preparing to pounce. It may have something to do with her clothes, or the considerable lack of them, Dalmascan formal dress with a preference for using much to cover nothing. Krjn makes the sound that everyone makes upon first laying eyes on Balthier, followed by the glance they bestow upon her, certain that she must know what she is doing despite all appearances.

“Take care not to let that bounty climb too high,” she says, the hint of a smile over her shoulder as Fran lifts a hand in farewell.

Easy enough to make a calm, slow circuit of the courtyard, so that Balthier can see that she has arrived while doing… whatever it is he thinks he is doing. After a time, Fran retreats to a pillar at the far wall, well out of the flow of traffic, in line of sight to study the palace’s defenses, charting out no less than five possible ways in by the time Balthier has detached himself from the girl. He strolls lazily across the pavilion, tossing a few candied fruits into his mouth. A great banquet has been laid out for the city, the King’s gift to his people in honor of a joyous union, and from what she can tell Balthier has not stopped eating since their arrival.

“I assume the treasure was not in her bodice, then?”

“It’s a party, Fran. If you don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself, they’ll know something’s up.” Anyone else would see a man half-drunk and thinking only of how to finish what he’d started, though she can see the quiet calculations behind his eyes. “Shall we take a stroll around the grounds? I hear the west gardens make for a lovely escape route.”

No normal kind of heist, this, no simple matter of sneaking into the nearest vault and leaving with what is most expensive and easy to carry. Doubtless there are a dozen more sensible and profitable crimes being committed all over Rabanastre, but this is about more than simple gain. Balthier had stolen the Strahl - liberated it from Archadian hands, along with himself - and there had been no real plan in that moment, only clear skies and an escape from what he called the stifling weight of Imperial bureaucracy, the need to verify every act of justice with the “Second Adjunct Forms Office of the Department of Redundancy Commission,” and that when his orders had allowed any room for justice to be done at all.

Now, as Archadia has set its sights on conquest and Rozarria makes ready to advance, Balthier has settled on a strategy, perhaps the reason he’d asked her to join up at the start. Three Shards of the Sun-Cryst, three ornaments of the gods, passed down through the ages to Raithwall’s chosen heirs. The kind of weapon that could stop the advance of titans, could at least provide the foothold for negotiations, and though Raminas must possess the Dusk Shard he has yet to present it, to wield its power and demand compromise. Whatever the reason for it, that he is too old for such bold action or too comfortable with peace to truly read Archadia’s intent, Balthier does not share his hesitance. He will find the Dusk Shard. He will make the stand on Dalmasca’s behalf, and if power and threat is all that will move empires to action he will present them with both. Venture to neutral ground, perhaps, to the mystics at Bur-Omisace and demand parley. Stand strong where Raminas cannot, and find a way to change the course of nations.

All of this, of course, depends on if they can find it.

The reason for all his study, surely, as they slip into the palace, enough noise from the streets that no one notices their advance, Nabradia’s impressive retinue providing enough unfamiliar faces that there is little worry in a glance, and they are fast enough that there will be no second look. Balthier has studied all his spells, collecting rare scrolls so that he can open the vault doors, even those that seek special keys. He has a few other tricks in hand that may prove useful in detecting Deifacted Nethicite - different from what they can make in Archadia, he says, and far more powerful - but Fran knows he is hoping for her aid, that her sharper senses and affinity to the Mist may prove useful in finding their prize.

Apart from that, and a few unfounded rumors, there is nothing to aid their search through Dalmasca’s vaults. No certainty the Sun-Cryst’s boon even rests within the palace walls, and though they find gems and gold and ancient treasures of all kinds, there is no sign of the Dusk Shard. Balthier hides his annoyance well, only a flickering intensity in his eyes as they move from room to room, the spells proving useless once they’re inside, unlocked boxes and chests revealing coin and cloth and the gleam of countless gems, but nothing more.

It is only after the second time that they are nearly discovered, a misstep knocking a globe of gold and emerald to rattle across the floor, coming to a halt at the feet of a curious guard who has opened the door Fran stands silently behind that she knows this will not end in victory, even for all of the pirate’s mad fortune. It is finding a single blade of grass at the bottom of the Golmore, and she knows that Balthier knows it too, seeing his shoulders slump as he shifts out of his crouch, the vault door clicking closed as the guard returns to his patrol.

“It seems this was all for nothing.”

Fran plucks a sapphire from the table, rolling it along the back of her hand, what seems like a thousand glittering facets and as large as a bird’s egg.

“Perhaps it is not entirely in vain.”

The impromptu heist lacks style, nothing more than small items easily carried, though she notes the tome in Balthier’s hand where any other man would have sought gold. A few more moments, and they are sneaking down a back passage, currently empty of all but night air and shadows, and the sound of the wedding feast still underway. A voice rises, and another, and then a cheer - Fran imagines it must be prince and princess kissing for all to see, a hume tradition, no doubt helped along by a considerable amount of wine.

Balthier is looking down the dark hall to the faint brightness at its end, a glowing hearth of sound and life that seems a different world from where they stand in cool darkness. A golden line traces the edge of his features, that familiar gaze to the horizon even with no open sky to see. A clink of glasses, a toast being raised, to the health and happiness of the bride and groom, and Balthier smiles, the way a man might at a fond and distant memory.

“I would wish for other things, before I wished her joy.”

——————————

Tensions rise higher in the North with every day that passes, and it is easier and more profitable to do business inside Rozarria’s borders, at least less of a chance of having the Strahl conscripted for service. Balthier is in low spirits for not having uncovered the Dusk Shard, and there seems little in the way of new information, even as the skies fill with chatter. No matter where they touch down, there are always nervous questions, wariness or worry all the more evident when it is badly masked with politeness. What is going to happen, and when, and no one has the answers. Bur-Omisace has called for negotiations, that all sides might come together under a flag of truce, and put a halt to what is happening before it can begin. Each nation has sent ambassadors, even Archadia, though Balthier barely gave the news any notice, too polite to say it would all be for nothing.

The Strahl comes under a bit more scrutiny, as does every ship of anything approaching an Imperial design. Rozarrian ships are hewn from darker metals, silver and gunmetal trimmed with wrought-iron lacework, a near-perfect contrast to Archadian cream, ivory and gold. Balthier contemplates painting the ship, and Nono contemplates taking the wrench to him again, but in the end nothing much comes of it. So many ships in the skies now, hailing from every port and all of them moving south. Those with the money to do so are already shifting their trade routes, adjusting their strategies, and that is a thought that can make Balthier’s mood turn even darker, that there are those who are waiting with anticipation for what is to come, those who see nothing but profit to be made in chaos, strife and suffering.

They land one morning at the edge of a city on the Rozarrian coast, a small, wealthy town far away from even the hint of danger. Balthier is off to discuss a job that is both legal and simple, for once, and he has left a surprise behind for her. A family name, for a youngest son who had disappeared many years ago near the Golmore, no sign of him ever recovered. Before arriving, Balthier had written to them and mentioned her book and the response had been immediate, brought by private courier to meet them the moment they’d docked. A request that Fran should come as soon as she was able.

So here she is, making her way along a narrow coast road, the sea crashing up in great bursts of foam around spires of stone like well-burnished steel. The cliffs rise high, dark-roofed mansions stretched all across their edge, with high walls separating them from the road. Each of these is lined with its own pattern of painted tiles in brilliant colors, and Fran can easily imagine an adventurer born in such a place, raised between the vast expanse of trees that encroach upon the narrow road and the ever-present roar of the sea.

She had feared she might find a widow, with children who had grown up waiting for their father’s return, but Balthier had been given the name of the family’s estate alone. When Fran reaches the door a servant bows and leads her to a stone courtyard trimmed in white flowers, the walls high enough that the sea is shut out by the peaceful trickling of a water garden. The floors and walls are all carefully set with more of the same intricate tiles, etched in complicated patterns.

It is custom to bring a gift when visiting a Rozarrian home, especially on one’s first visit, though Fran could think of nothing that would mean anything against the book in her hand. As the time passes, and no one comes to see her, she wonders if perhaps they have changed their minds. If coming here had truly been the right idea.

The lady of the house is tall, modestly dressed compared to their opulent surroundings. Old, for a hume, moving slowly and carefully, but her eyes are clear and steady as she meets Fran’s gaze, pausing for a moment at the doorway before she smiles and bows her head in welcome.

“I apologize for not attending to you more promptly. I… it has been many years since I have seen one of your people, and never so close, and I had heard…” The woman pauses, and Fran has the suspicion she is rarely this far out of her composure. “I was told that you might have news of my son.”

Fran holds out the book, and even before the woman takes it her eyes fill with tears.

———————————————-

“He had wanted to see more of the world. Always, always more. His brothers were businessmen, like their father, but even when he was small, my youngest was always off on his own. Adventuring.”

Fran watches the woman turn the pages slowly, reaching out now and then to smooth a line with a fingertip, smiling gently. A few moments of weeping, and she had regained her calm enough to offer Fran a seat, and an apology for not knowing her way around viera appetites, unsure of what might offend. When Fran makes no particular preference, there are instantly plates of cake and sandwiches, rich coffee and imported Archadian tea - Rozarrians take great pains with their hospitality, a point of pride and one of the reasons they are so successful in trade. The servant girls, all dark eyes and dark curls, have been peeking around corners and through windows, never quite stopping to stare but certainly making sure their tasks keep them at this side of the house, and passing by the garden door as much as possible.

The woman has asked for more books to be brought, a small stack for her to look through, that Fran may gain some better grasp of the young man she’s held as shadow, and silent guide for all these years. It is strange, how familiar the new pages seem, no real surprise to the careful, detailed sketches. He had been adept even from a young age, with portraits of friends and family rendered just as carefully as all the greatest splendors of Ivalice.

“I used to think my heart would stop, when he’d come back home with some tale of some monster he’d seen, some… hunt, I think they call them. His father tried to dissuade him, but there was no hope for it. He liked to chase after whoever was willing to go the furthest. So curious, always so curious, and he could never tell me why. I’d hoped… I’d hoped he would venture out and find a bride, or some occupation to keep him from harm.”

“I believe I know someone a good deal like your son,” Fran cannot help the slight, wry smile, “I doubt the most renowned of positions would have kept him from trouble.”

“Or a dozen wives.” The woman says, laughing a little, though it seems to open up an unexpected floodgate and she breathes in sharply, going pale once again. “Did… did he suffer?”

“No.” Fran says, grateful that the truth can be kind. “When we found him, it seemed he had slipped from the path, and fallen. I am sure it was over before he knew what had happened. We buried him in the Wood. We did not… I did not know your customs.”

“… and your Wood, is it beautiful?”

“Yes.”

The single word is not enough, for either of them, but Fran cannot think of how to describe it all, how this hume, her son might have described it. The same journey for the both of them, searching and seeing without destination, without anything but the need to see what wonders lie past the setting sun. A breathless amazement at the world, with so much in it - too much - even this terrace and this view of the sea different than anything Fran has seen before, and tomorrow it may be another shore just as new. The world will not stand still for anyone, nor should it, and she is sorry for the death of this boy she never knew, though carrying his pictures, his wonder with her it feels as if she knows him as well as anyone. It feels like she has brought him home at last.

“The Golmore is an endless green, and even when the rains come the sun continues to shine, and all the world is ever warm and full of life. It is… very beautiful.”

“A place unlike anywhere else, I am sure.” The woman nods, and gently closes the book. “So, at least I know he is at peace. It would all have made him happy, I think - and certainly so, to know such a beautiful woman has kept him in her thoughts all this time.” She clasps the little book to her heart. “I cannot begin to thank you enough, for all that you have done for me, for our family.”

Of course she will try, and this being Rozarria there is no polite way to avoid accepting such a gift. Fran is thinking how Balthier might well enjoy a few days relaxing in some distant wing of this estate when a man lurches through the door, pale and wide eyed.

“Mother! Where is Adelia? Where is Raseda?”

The woman blinks, obviously startled by his lack of manners, and turns to Fran. “I would introduce my eldest son. Raseda and Adelia are my two youngest girls.”

The man gives Fran only the barest passing glance. He has dust on his boots all the way to the tops, and Fran can hear him panting for breath. It seems as if he ran the entire way up the steep road she took to get here, no simple task. “Where are they?”

“I hope this is worth your impoliteness. Raseda is in the capital through the end of the holiday season, and I believe Adelia and her husband were in the north, in Nabradia, finishing up with some business there.”

Simply by her tone, Fran can tell the woman is unaware of how badly things have deteriorated, that her children have chosen to keep the worst from her - which makes his panic all the more unnerving. Her son is strong, broad-shouldered and solemn, but at word of Nabradia it seems as if he might very well fall. A tiny noise of pain in the back of his throat, all the more alarming for how quiet it is, a hand pressed to his mouth and Fran needs to find Balthier, to know what they will do now that Archadia has finally made their declaration of war.

“Where did they strike? How far have they advanced?” Fran says, just as the man talks over her.

“ _Where_ in Nabradia, Mother? Where!?”

“The capital, I believe? No… no, that’s not right. He does business to the west of it, there is a smaller town. Adelia said she might even wait for him in Dalmasca, with everything the way it is. Why? What has happened?” Looking between the two of them, with hands white-knuckled on the book that has brought some small part of her lost child back to her, even as this day may threaten to take another. Fran can hear the maids speaking to each other inside, a chorus of hushed, high-voiced whispers and panicked, fluttering hands.

“Has something happened in Nabudis?” The lady reaches up for her son’s sleeve. “What part of the city?”

He laughs then, and the sound seems torn from him like a knife.

—————————————————-

Fran does not need to see it. The force of it trembles and shudders through her, the same as it does through the ship, the skystone whining, fighting to stay aloft in the roiling Mist, and all the moogles are attending to it, working furiously to keep the Strahl steady as Balthier stands in the cockpit, staring out over the void, the darkly churning emptiness that had once been Nabudis. A jagged gash in the heart of the world.

The radio traffic has been steady panic from the moment they’d lifted off from Rozarria, from every ship and every port, begging for news of family, of friends, and by the time they hit Dalmasca’s borders there are a half-dozen calls from names Fran barely remembers, frantic to find the Strahl. Grateful to hear she and Balthier are all right, giving her updates on anyone who made it out, and those they already know who didn’t, and the long list of those still unaccounted for. It is worse, in a way, for those in the skies, when a cargo haul might run in and out of Nabudis twice a week, and so the question quickly becomes one of pure luck. Rose and Skylark are still unaccounted for, ‘My Bonny Bride’ not yet on any of the lists being read off, those ships that were certainly in port when it happened.

 _What happened?_ The same breathless question from port to port. _What has happened to Nabudis?_

“The Midlight Shard,” Balthier said, and nothing more, barely a grunt to acknowledge her or any of the moogles. By the time she had returned to the aerodrome he had already started in on alterations to the engines, cutting the power but providing better shields against Mist disruption. It is the only reason they are in the skies now, when most other ships have scrambled for safe harbor amidst panicked stories of those with lesser engines, skystone scraps compressed into makeshift stones by pirates and smugglers that had suddenly crumbled, or exploded midair, no match against the turmoil in the skies.

Fran wonders if she might do the same, on fire beneath her skin as the Mist rages and roils, and it takes all her strength not to dig her claws into her arms until they draw blood, leaning heavily against the wall as she shivers and staggers down the corridor to where Balthier is still standing. His expression has been long fixed into a mask of violent anger, and it is as painful to look at as the view in front of them. Nothing but shattered trees and vast furrows in the earth, the blurry, insubstantial shadow melting to the horizon, as if a great hand reached down and pressed the world into a blackened smear.

The Strahl is poised much higher than she usually flies, a hundred miles or more out from the epicenter of the damage and still the engines threaten every few moments not to catch, to give up struggling against the chaos and sink down into the dark. It had been a race to even get free of Rozarria, airships being grounded for their own safety, for the safety of a world still trying to figure out what had _happened_ , but Balthier slipped through unnoticed, wove past the border guards when they’d hit Dalmasca, and beyond that there had hardly been any air traffic at all. Bhujerba is in total lockdown, no ships in or out, though thankfully it seems the island itself is not in danger.

The last airship they’d seen had been Imperial, the Dreadnought _Leviathan_ far off in the distance when they’d crossed into Nabradia, and Balthier snarled ‘Nethicite’ under his breath and kept flying, and Fran had gone to her room to sleep, as if what had happened were a shock that would wear off. As if they weren’t flying right into the middle of it, and things could only get worse, but she simply hadn’t been thinking and now it is impossible to do so.

Prince Rasler - King Rasler now - is all that remains of the Nabradian royal line. The palace gone, the courtyards and alleys and the vast lake with its little ships vanished forever. The shop where Fran had last found fresh raspberries, with the little boy who’d shyly peeked out at her from behind a counter while his mother asked if she wanted blueberries as well. Three airships and all their crew listed among the early dead, men and women she had feasted and celebrated with over long, wild nights. Every person she’d ever spoken to in the aerodrome, and even some among her exiled kin, at least two viera who had called Nabudis home. Fran has never truly grown accustomed to the size of hume cities, long since given up on trying to figure out how many times over her village could fit in Rabanastre, or Bhujerba, but this destruction is nothing anyone, not hume or seeq or moogle, can begin to comprehend.

So many gone, swallowed up forever by the Mist that hisses in her ears, that tenses her muscles in fury only to drain them until she can barely stand, the world slipping in and out of focus in a violent tide. It is a fight to keep her balance, claws catching in the joins in the walls, her gaze fixed on Balthier who has not moved at all in the time it has taken her to get this far. Has not moved, perhaps, since he poised the ship at the edge of the abyss, and it hurts to get closer. This is not the Balthier she knows but some other man. A man who had been an Archadian Judge, who had run from their rules and obligations; who had done his best to divert the course of war.

A man who knew all along what the shards could do. A man who had seen this all coming, when _no one_ had seen this coming, and tried to stop it.

Fran does not know this man at all.

“Balthier… Balthier, I…”

He turns, and Fran watches the anger drain from him all at once as her hand leaves the wall and what’s left of her balance fails her, and she falls into his arms. Balthier is staring at her with wide, panicked eyes, and speaking, but she cannot hear him over the roar of the ocean, the engine, the Mist…

———————————————-

Fran wakes feeling hot, her mouth sticky and dry, aching to the very tips of her ears, but there is no more feel of the Mist raging away inside of her. Just echoes, and the darkness, and the quiet breathing that proves she is not alone.

“… Balthier?”

A soft gasp, and the creak of the chair, and a cool cloth at her brow. Fran licks her lips and in another moment his arm is behind her head, a cup at her lips and she drinks deeply. She can hear Balthier’s breath catch more than once, and it is a long time before he finally breaks the silence.

“I’m sorry, Fran. I didn’t… I will not ask your forgiveness. I do not deserve it. I wasn’t thinking of, I… I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”

He has turned the lights off for her sake, though her vision is still quite good in the dark. Enough to see the stubble on a face she has rarely seen other than clean-shaven. He looks weary and haggard, laid every inch as low as she has been, and Fran knows then that Balthier thought she was dying. It is likely he’s been sitting here in the dark just waiting for her to breathe her last, exhaustion dragging him into a stupor until she’d said his name. Even now he is wary, almost frightened, bracing himself for a well-deserved retaliation. As if Fran has the energy to do more than blink, a struggle to lift her hand, sliding it gently along his rough cheek. He trembles beneath her touch, and shuts his eyes.

“Where are we?”

“Southwest Rozarria. As far away as I could get. I took her to ground. It’s hard to say who’s more annoyed with me, the engines or the moogles.”

It is painful, his feigned attempt at good cheer. He thought he’d killed her.

“How long?”

“It’s been two days.” Balthier puts his hand over hers, turns his head to press a familiar kiss into her palm, but it’s tentative, as if he doubts his welcome, and it is only when he sets her hand back at her side and rises to his feet that she realizes he is leaving. Fran tries to get up, but can do little more than lift her head.

“Where are you going?”

He doesn’t turn around. “One of the moogles will be in soon, if you need anything.”

It’s not an answer, but Fran doesn’t need one. Balthier’s going to the engine room, and he’ll lock the door, and he won’t come out for three days.


	5. Chapter 5

“Are you in or out?”

“In. Might as well make it a total loss.”

“I fold. This hand’s nothing but moogle shit.”

“You cheap bastard.”

“All right, gentlemen, who’s buying my next round? Lay ‘em down.”

Fran turns away from the chatter at the table, perched on a seat in the balcony above near an alcove of half-open windows. It is a cool and quiet night outside, the sound of small waves lapping against Balfonheim’s docks, nearly as bright outside as it is within. The sky is cloudy, but boats with lit lanterns are stretched out along the bay, with the running lights of low-flying airships winking overhead. The port is more crowded than usual, many of those displaced by the chaos on land finding their way here. Even the most ardent thrillseekers seem to be weighing anchor, uncertain of just how the wind will blow.

“Damn it, Balthier! Again?” Rose exclaims sharply, though there is laughter in it, no danger in the rest of the irritated groans. All the wagers this night have been friendly, no one wishing to play for high stakes considering what’s happening in the world outside. “You really do have the gods’ own luck.”

“I’m also alarmingly handsome.” Balthier, his voice as confident and cavalier as ever, chuckles to himself as he rakes the spoils across the table. Fran’s stomach twists, and she keeps her eyes on the sea.

No one has claimed responsibility for Nabudis. No one will even openly assert that it was the Midlight Shard that caused the blast, let alone place any blame, but there is little doubt as to who has gained the most from such a tragedy, Archadia pressing in on the Dalmascan border even as the Gran Kiltias made a rare proclamation, marking a holy day in honor of all those lost. Urging for peace, that no more should follow on such a ruinous path.

His hopes, as with those of so many others, have not met a good end. It has been only a matter of weeks, that the last of Nabradia’s forces had fallen at Nalbina. The battle a rout, with King Rasler dead before he could even be properly crowned and the last flicker of hope for Dalmasca to defend herself snuffed out in the Empire’s iron grasp. Balthier had barely blinked twice at the news.

He has returned to her from the inner heart of the Strahl almost a stranger, as if the all years between them had never been. The indifferent pirate once more, deflecting every look with a smile and every question with a glib reply and all that Archadia has done and will do is no more than water sliding off glass. As if now there is nothing left for them to do but see what new profit might be made from the chaos, such a lie that Fran is almost afraid of the truth it conceals.

“You’ll get salt in your fur, if you stay there too long.”

Fran turns, Skylark offering both a smile and a glass of the house’s better spirits. She has never much acquired the taste for hume liquors, can barely remember the sour-sweet bite of what they’d made in the Wood, honeyed mead and flower-scented wine, but the drink is unpleasant enough to distract her from her thoughts, so Fran is grateful for it.

“Do the viera get seasick?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never gone out to sea.” As far as Fran knows, none of her sisters have, and even exiled from the Wood she cannot imagine giving up on the trees completely. The pirate makes a small, dismissive sound.

“You’re not missing much. I promise you, an airship’s what you want, even with the skies the way they are.”

Skylark swirls the dark liquid around in her glass, gazing into it much as Fran had been looking at the waves. It had been a whim of fortune that ‘My Bonny Bride’ had not been one more ship lost in Nabudis, a single day’s change of plan that had kept them out of the city. Now they are here for the same reason everyone has come to Balfonheim, to trade rumor and speculation, to survive on whatever work there is that won’t take them too far south, and waiting. All of Ivalice just waiting to see how far Archadia will push before Rozarria retaliates. This very night, it’s been said that King Raminas of Dalmasca has agreed to sign a treaty of peace. Handing his country and sovereignty over to Archadia to avoid a war he cannot win.

“How’s he holding up?” Skylark says, the both of them watching Balthier flirt audaciously with the tavern girl as she comes into the room to hand out another round. Her smile is genuine and there is nothing in his to suggest otherwise, that this is anything but another pleasant evening in good company, with the war as only a troublesome inconvenience.

Balthier wakes up shouting in the middle of the night. Fran can hear it echo down the metal halls even with his door closed and locked. He spends much of his time behind closed doors now, or on his way out of whatever room she walks into, engrossed in his own affairs or at least pretending to be. Fran often thinks of stopping him, of putting her hands on his shoulders and just holding him there until he speaks to her, but she cannot bring herself to do it. Not when she can see the pain he struggles so hard to conceal, and not when she has no answers, no way to make this right. The rules of Eruyt have no weight here, her wisdom with little purchase against the might of such vast armies, when whole cities can be scoured clean out of what seems barely indifference, nothing more than the smallest tactical advantage.

“He is ashamed of Archadia’s victory.”

She nods, tipping back the rest of her drink. “He’s never liked it much, being a northerner.” The silence between them stretches out, as Skylark rolls the glass back and forth in her hand. “Did you lose anyone, in Nabudis?”

“A few of my sisters, yes. It is good, though, to see that you and Rose are safe.”

The pirate grins. “As much as anyone can be, these days. Hell of a thing, isn’t it all?” Draining the rest of her drink in one go, pretending she doesn’t care as much as Fran is certain she does. The words are insufficient - but deliberately so. Eloquence in the face of so much destruction seems almost an insult. “What’s your plan, then? Balthier’s always one with his next move in mind. If I were you, I’d think about settling down. He’s more than good enough as a mechanic, you could turn a tidy profit while you wait for the skies to cool.”

“Mm.”

Balthier has said Fran has the perfect face for cards, even if she never plays. It does not seem to work on Skylark, or perhaps she knows Balthier too well, glancing down to where he is dealing out another hand before she looks back up, her eyes dark and hard.

“Gods save him from himself… the stupid boy thinks he can stop a war.”

No. He’s already tried to, and Fran isn’t sure what will happen now that he has failed.

The tavern is very full, and very loud, so at first she hears nothing but a shift in the roar, the steady rhythm of crowded conversation suddenly knocked off center. It is chilling, to hear an entire bar’s worth of drunks and pirates going perfectly silent as a lone voice repeats the message.

“King Raminas is dead, along with his daughter. The treaty is broken. Archades will be at Dalmasca by morning.”

“Bloody hell,” Skylark sighs, and Fran watches cards scatter on the table below as curses fill the air, the game instantly forgotten, “there goes Rabanastre.”

A dozen conversations all spring up, overlapping each other until Fran can only pick out an odd word here or there, weary or concerned or irritated, though they mostly share Skylark’s sentiment. Wondering about the trade routes that might yet be open, whether it might be better to risk a dash toward Rozarria in the middle of a war or wait for Archadia to close its new borders and hope for the best. Whether Bhujerba remains open, and just what the hell happened _this_ time. That if Archadia is so dead set on taking Dalmasca, on bringing everything they can see under the guns of their airships, should Balfonheim and every single one of them with a ship in port not be a bit more worried for their future?

Fran looks down to where Balthier sits silently, his gaze fixed on his hands, shuffling the cards once, and again, and again.

———————————

He stays out with the other pirates well after Fran has returned to the Strahl, but when she wakes it is not to laughter or voices or stumbling steps. If the door had been closed, even she might have missed the slight scrape and tap of steel on steel, light pouring out of a dining room that hardly ever gets used as such. The moogles take meals in their own quarters and Balthier prefers to eat standing up, giving over most the space to schematics, bits and pieces of whatever machinery has been the last to catch his fancy.

Fran leans against the doorway, Balthier hunched over his newest acquisition, a delicate cage of metal and wire and stone. He is squinting, even using his strongest loupe, and though the handle of the tool he holds is normal-sized, Fran can see the end taper down to a pinpoint - moogle-sized wrenches. Standardization is a frustrating business for skyships, with Archadian and Rozarrian employing different systems of measurement, each with their own tool set. The Strahl is a necessary mix of whatever is available in whatever port they land in, Balthier mixing and matching parts with careless abandon. The ship also contains a considerable number of moogle kit parts, fitted for the tinkering of much smaller paws, the kind that require the delicate set of tools he’s using now. It is a strangely overcomplicated system, and intentionally so, though Balthier always seems to know exactly what he needs and where to find it.

She is content to watch him, as peaceful and focused as ever while putting something together or taking it apart. The night is his, and Balthier works calmly and methodically through some unmarked space of time, until he finally leans back, stretching his shoulders and letting the loupe fall down to glint against his half-open shirt. He examines his progress with a critical eye, though Fran still cannot tell what it is, or whether he’s succeeded. As she shifts in the doorway Balthier looks up, quite clear he hasn’t noticed her all this time, and she aches for what scatters his momentary contentment - nervousness, sorrow, shame, always shame - finally settling back into a quiet, weary neutrality.

“Did I wake you?”

“No,” It feels as if she is hunting an elusive beast, only a flicker of it visible here and there, and the wrong word or motion might chase it away forever. “Is that for the Strahl?”

“This? No,” Balthier says, and spins it gently with a flick of his wrist, crystal chips refracting the light. “Skylark wanted me to see if I could improve on it for the Bride before they weighed anchor. It detects anomalies in the Mist, more than just those caused by the Jagd.” Ever since Nabudis, there has been little way to separate rumor from fact but the stories of ships’ engines overloading, or failing without warning, nowhere near dangerous areas - it’s been enough to have pilots and pirates alike taking any advantage they can get.

“How well does it work?”

“Better than nothing, and not as well as it should. Judging Mist by machine has never been an exact science. I… much prefer your company, in that regard.” The smile is painfully tentative, hopeful and warm and the first real sign they are still partners she has seen in a long time. Fran swallows back against sudden tension - the moment is fragile. It seems a risk to even breathe.

“I am here, Balthier.”

He leans back, his head against the wall, and shuts his eyes, letting out a breath that seems to take most of him with it. Fran is across the room in a few silent steps, and with only a moment’s hesitation her hand slides through his hair, claws gently scratching as he turns to rest his head against her stomach, his arm curling around her, holding her close.

“I’m sorry, Fran.”

“Why?” It is the wrong question, one he will not answer, and she is not surprised when Balthier only tightens his hold. Fran thinks over the night, of the details of that disastrous meeting at the fortress at Nalbina, of truth and rumor and conjecture.

“King Raminas was not murdered by his own men.”

“No.” Balthier laughs, low and bitter “If the Empire reports it as such, you can safely assume it was anyone else.” A slight, rueful shake of his head, “What a fool, to die like that. Believing great Archades would be magnanimous. Thinking he could trust them, when he had the power to save himself.”

“Why did they bother with the lie?” Archadia showed Nabudis no mercy, and that was not even an act of war - why not simply open fire on Rabanastre? A show of strength where Rozarria was sure to see it. “Did they not wish to risk the Shard?”

“By any accounts, the Shards are all but indestructible. No weapon forged by man can so much as scratch them. Even the Midlight Shard remains somewhere in Nabudis, I suppose. No… this was Archadian politics at their very finest. It is some way of influencing Bhujerba, perhaps - or the Emperor proving a point to the Senate. Or his son, finally making a move.”

“Vayne Solidor.”

“Just so. As if the world ever needed another Solidor.”

Fran can feel the tension in him, as if holding on to something too heavy for too long, and she has no wish to press him further. Instead her gaze falls to the table, the various tools and papers he has scattered about him. She had assumed they were all for what he had been working on, or yet again another upgrade for the Strahl. Instead, there seem to be all sorts of topics she might choose from, the esoteric chaos of his own quarters taking root here as well. The texts at the top of the pile are all old scraps of what seem to be copied maps of the Nam-Yensa sandsea, with notes in what she recognizes as Balthier’s careful hand. After a moment, he looks to where her gaze has fallen.

“The last Shard is almost certainly in Raithwall’s Tomb, though the magicks on it and the Jagd have kept it untouched for centuries. At this rate, with the Nethicite under their control, Archadia will simply be able to park its largest guns above it and crack it open at their leisure.”

Fran reaches down to slide another paper forward, a vessel with far more decks than even a passenger skyship, its name finally appearing at the far edge.

“The Dreadnought Leviathan.”

“We saw it the once, near Nabradia. The flagship of the eighth fleet. Passed around between the Judge Magisters, depending on who is highest in the Emperor’s favor. I believe Ghis commands it now.” He reaches out, sliding his finger across the middle of the diagram, a straight line through the center of the ship.

“You can’t see it, but between the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth decks there’s a bulkhead a little less than nine feet further left than it ought to be. It’s all perfectly sound, but one doesn’t build a ship that size, not an Imperial flagship, and ever admit to such a mistake. So they pretended it was storage no one had the clearance to use, and the build team called it a door to nowhere. A hallway running the entire length of the ship, connected in all the places the workers found convenient when they were welding her together. The average soldier doesn’t even know it’s there.”

Fran remembers Balthier winking at her, playing the Judge to a room full of half-interested men far away from anyone who might know otherwise. She tries to imagine how many soldiers would be aboard such a ship, and how seriously they would take their duties. The risk of any kind of plan, no matter how well thought-out it seemed, and how many maps of his promised protection. The question of why is not even important, nothing he is thinking could be worth such a risk.

“You would not do this.”

“No,” Balthier says, but the word does not give her comfort, not with the way he draws back from her, the way it sounds like regret. “I thought once, that it might be… but it doesn’t matter now. Just fleeting fancies from a restless fool. The Strahl’s spent too much time with her wings tucked in.”

“Do you have a destination, or should we simply fly?”

He looks a bit happier at the thought, and perhaps at least some of this is not as bad as it seems, simply the frustration of being forcibly grounded for so long. “I would like to see how things settle with Rabanastre first. If Rozarria should…” Balthier trails off, rubbing at his eyes. “It’s late, Fran. I ought get some sleep.” He taps the side of his newest creation with the edge of his wrench. “I don’t suppose I could ask you to take this to the Bride tomorrow for me? Tell Skylark it should do some little good, though it is hardly a perfect solution. I… tell them that I am sorry, for not being proper company.”

“I am sure you are forgiven.”

Fran will remember this moment, when she meets his eyes and he smiles and the air thaws between them, and if things are not exactly as they were then there is the promise it will be so, and soon. At least, she believes it to be as she strolls through the streets the next morning, to the other side of Balfonheim. The Bonny Bride is docked in one of those acquaintence-of-a-friend-of-an-owes-me-a-favor that stand as the common currency among most sky pirates. Fran will remember how quiet the day seemed, sunny and peaceful despite what she knew was happening elsewhere, a kingdom fallen, a general put to the sword for treason and regicide. The loud, painful, furious history of humes.

Later, it will all seem so obvious. The thaw that was no thaw at all, Balthier no longer so troubled because he had finally come to a decision, but Fran does not know this even as she hands the box over, Skylark taking the lid off, lifting up the small, glittering patchwork that may yet keep their ship in the sky.

“Oh, Fran, there’s something else… ah, silly boy must have knocked it in here by accident.”

The bag is tellingly heavy in her hands, but Fran still does not understand. Not even when it opens to reveal more coin than she can count, loose jewels and thin gold bars stacked high, enough to set her up in any port she pleases. It is only when she sees the scrap of parchment, a piece of paper that barely counts as a note, torn at the edge as if written, ripped away and re-written many times over, that the truth reaches down and pulls out the ground beneath her feet.

_I hope this will show my gratitude in some small measure. Our partnership has been all that I could ask for, and it is wrong of me to ask any more._

_Yours always - Balthier_

Fran does not even bother with the door, leaping out the window and down to the terrace below with Skylark shouting after her, and her claws scrape on the tiles as she sprints across the rooftops, the heavy bag jangling in her hand as a match to her thoughts, a wild mix of anger and disbelief and the need to go faster, even though there is no reason to run as quickly as she does. Fran already knows she is too late, even before she slides around the final corner, even before she sees that the door is open, the hangar is empty and the Strahl is gone.


	6. Chapter 6

On a map, the Feywood sits little more than a handsbreadth from the Golmore, what had once been all that Fran had ever known. On the ground, it is a whole different world. 

The rippling rock gleams wetly beneath her feet, damp and chill even as the air burns with a false heat, the Mist an oppressive wall that makes her eyes water. Thick enough here to send the world into chaos, snow swirling around her, drifts that melt into swampy pools without warning, no two breaths the same. The air flickers with false reflections, Mist illusions that are startling in their sudden clarity. The trees stand fixed as fortresses, towering overhead to vanish in the clinging haze that falls over everything, but even with her claws against them Fran can feel no sign of life, as if they are as empty as the stones. All is eerily silent, and still. At times, even her lightest footsteps betray her, the crystalline husks of a thousand fallen snowflies crunching under her boots. 

Each step she takes is more dangerous than the last, with lurking shadows in the Mist, creatures that scuffle and scream in the distance. More than once, Fran has heard a snort, the sound of something large catching her scent, but she is swift enough to slip past before she can catch the shape of it. It would be very easy to die here. Balthier is so careful when he wishes to be, but he is only a hume, and this strange, sprawling waste is proving well a match to even her keen senses.

\--------------------------

It should not have taken her so long to find him, the Strahl with only a few hours’ head start at the most and the _Bonny Bride_ at her disposal the moment she’d told them of Balthier’s ‘plan,’ what little of it she knew only sharpening her fears. After all they have been through together, cave-ins and close calls and creatures of every shape and monstrous size, how great is the danger, that he would want her leagues clear of the fallout?

Balthier is going to kill the Archadian Emperor. It is the only thing that makes sense, and all too likely that he will try for this Vayne Solidor as well. He has abandoned her because there is no way he can think to do it without sacrificing himself. The first few days are the worst of all, then, leaving the _Bride_ behind when they run up against an Archadian patrol with too keen an interest in their ship, Skylark and Rose reluctantly returning to Balfonheim while Fran takes up with whatever ship will grant her passage. Using the network of all those allies she and Balthier have made over the years, and when those routes are exhausted, taking up the old novelty of simply being a pretty viera in need of transportation, and that alone finally gains her clear passage to Archades. 

Fran is certain, with every day that passes, that she will hear of what Balthier has done before she can find a way to stop him. It matters little to her, the lives of the Emperor or his son, nothing she has seen or heard to make them men worth saving. Blood on their hands even by the most generous measure, but Balthier should not give his life for this, and he should not have to face it alone. More than once she thinks it would not be so difficult to take her bow and lie in wait, to take care of both emperor and heir herself and save him the trouble.

After so long amidst uncertainty and fear it feels strange to walk Archades’ well-paved streets and hear so little of the war. Rozarria is of some interest, of whether they dare challenge the Imperial fleets and if they have strength to do so. Nabudis has sparked the same vague fears here as everywhere else, no city as safe as it once seemed, but there is little talk of Rabanastre here. A shame the king is dead, and one of his own to blame for the treacherous deed, but that is all so far away and the day has far more pressing concerns for the tradesman, the merchant, the scholar.

Fran spreads word of her search for the Strahl with everyone she knows who knows Balthier. She steps into Clan halls where her bounty is on full display, unsurprised when no one steps up to collect. It amuses most who hear the news, that Balthier has once again acted the proper rogue and betrayed his partner, not a single version of the story that suggests Fran was ever anything but too good for him. She ignores the gossip, let them all believe what they will, that Balthier is out on a reckless escapade with some new partner and there is no need for her to constantly search the skies, ears playing tricks on her with every ship that passes. 

One of them catches her eye, a smaller, private vessel, emblazoned along its side with the crest of a House, two birds mirrored along a diagonal, a spear clutched in their talons, and Fran remembers a sword, and the Ixion rampant. Very little to go on, but Fran has no other clues, and if she cannot find him there is some small comfort that at least she might walk the paths he took as a child, to see the world that he knew. 

It is easy to see how the narrow streets might feel a prison, the open sky a constant temptation, so much life suspended above. No matter where Fran is, or how high she climbs, the Imperial Palace still towers above all, gilt and glowing beneath the sun’s heavy rays. Still, there is a beauty in its vastness, in the chatter of students she passes, the sounds of industry from the shipwrights’ yards. Fran thinks of Balthier’s patience, his sharp gaze and careful hands, and loneliness whets itself in slow strokes on her heart.

Archades has more than one library. Archades has more than a hundred libraries, from the general to the highly specialized. Some stand open to the public while others are reserved for Judges, mages and historians, a vast chronicle of history and artifact reaching back to those documents penned by the hand of Raithwall himself, well before the dawn of the Empire. What Fran seeks is hardly so esoteric, certainly not hidden, though it takes her some time to find the proper building regardless, and the moogle behind the counter still laughs, wings fluttering when Fran presents her question.

“An ixion, you say? Just the one? What color for the background? Anything beneath its hooves? Is it the mother’s side or the father’s? On it’s hind legs, kupo? Are you certain it was just the one?”

Fran is not at all certain. For all she is aware, the symbol on Balthier’s blade had been simplified beyond all recognition, and this will all be for nothing. The moogle, however, sees a challenge to his skills, calling to a bangaa working in the long rows of shelves behind him, and soon they are carefully paging through books nearly as tall as the librarian is, row after row of brightly colored crests, the rankings and coats-of-arms for all the major and minor Houses of Archades. Histories and holdings and family trees, and Fran is amazed by it, such deep roots here for such unforgiving soil, until finally the page turns to a white-on-blue figure in a familiar form.

“Wait.” Fran says, and leans forward, though she does not need to see it more clearly to be sure. The horse, the mane, the banner - all is as she remembers it, though there is now a name inscribed on the narrow flag, and the moogle’s nose wrinkles.

“House Bunansa? You should have said it was one of the Thirty. We could have saved ourselves some time.”

So many humes in Archadia, that they must divide themselves up again and again to decide who is most worthy. A hundred of their most powerful families, and even of these there are distinctions, a select few set aside. It does not surprise her all that much to find Balthier among them.

“This House is very important?”

The moogle snorts. “Only if you need to fly.”

\-----------------------

It does not take much effort, to find her way to the estate of House Bunansa. The librarian suggests a mapmaker cousin who sells guides for the purpose, just as in Bhujerba, with tours that can be scheduled when the families are away, so less wealthy neighbors might learn to covet in as much detail as possible. No tours of the Bunansa home, with the gate that Fran nimbly leaps firmly locked and no sign of servants or maids. The narrow hallway of a garden is well tended, but there is an air of abandonment about the place, as if no one has walked the gravel path, or admired the flowers, or come to call in quite some time. 

The moogle had told her of Doctor Cidolfus Bunansa without needing to consult any guide. The head of his House, chief scientist of the Draklor Laboratories and the most brilliant shipwright of the age. He has books written about him, and those he has penned himself. Many of them. A man as able to build a ship of stunning beauty and power as he was to give it a brilliant heart, responsible for as many advances in engines as he was in the designs themselves. A scientist who worked directly under Vayne Solidor, their partnership forged in drive and determination, success after success that had come to change the course of the Empire itself.

 _A bastard’s bastard with a pet lunatic on a leash._ The words come back to her, and the look in Balthier’s eyes that night, that desolation she has seen time and again. In Rabanastre before the war, or gazing over the impossible horror of what had once been Nabudis.

Fran picks the lock on the front door fast, taking few pains to hide herself. No need, as it swings open she can see the mansion is just as quiet and empty as the gardens. Not a sign of dust or decay but all the furniture, each bit of finery under dropcloths, the whole house asleep. Her boots click quietly against well-polished floors, the closed doors all ornately carved and edged in gold, everything she sees speaking not only of wealth and power but legacy.

Archadia had been given the gift of Nethicite once more, not from the gods but the hands and minds of Draklor, a future dragged from legend, belonging only to men. The moogle knew little more of it, save that Rozarria now stood at a vast disadvantage, whatever might come, and there was one man to thank for it above all others.

 _“My father? Ah, my father…”_ Oh, the bitterness there. The way Balthier had not met her gaze.

The librarian’s paws traced to the end of the family tree, to the doctor and a wife who had died rather young - and that must be the portrait Fran is looking at now. A beautiful pale woman with a gentle smile, and the man with a hand on her shoulder lays to rest the last shred of doubt. Balthier will see that face in the mirror in twenty years’ time, if he does not do so already - and she’d wondered why he had always taken such pains to stay clean-shaven. 

A son. Dr. Cid of the great Draklor Laboratories had a son, and there is a birth date under his name - a name Fran traces with the tip of her claw - and then a blank space. The boy had been destined for great things, or at least that had been the word, but it had all gone silent years ago. The moogle shrugged, his wings twitching slightly. House business.

It is what they say in Archades when things are private, or ugly, or messy, and to be kept within the family. House business, for the wife that goes to the country for a rest, and never quite finds the time to return. An explanation for the struggle amongst brothers for rank and status, even when the blood starts flowing, or the daughter who chooses love over fealty, only to be brought to her senses in the end, one way or another.

The son who becomes a Judge. The Judge who becomes a sky pirate.

He is very handsome in his portrait, all new and shining armor and youth and pride, though even here Fran can see the smile in the corner of his mouth, Balthier peeking out from behind this stranger’s eyes. Fran looks at it for a long, long time, though much like the man she knows, it will not give her the answers she needs.

\----------------------------

Fran is grateful for the long journey back to the guild hall, for chance to think, or at least to feel the weight of it. A truth that has brought her no closer to finding him, and if he is not here there is no other city that will know more, no place larger or more well-connected. Surely he would not have gone to Dalmasca again, for another chance at finding the Shard? Fran cannot imagine it, even without her, Balthier would not risk his crew to open warfare, would not risk the _Strahl_ on such folly. 

It had been the father then, to instill such a love for the ships in his son. A father who had chosen war, and a son who had turned his back on all of it, his position and his wealth and a life of high honor. In Archadia there is hardly a greater sacrifice than letting go of one’s own name, and Balthier had done this, and _still_ the shame of what he had been, of what that name means has kept him silent all this time.

The hall is bordered on one side by a shop that repairs sky bikes and smaller craft, and as she has done so often before Fran lingers there, closing her eyes and breathing in deep, just for the smell of welded steel and stone-bound magicks. Imagine, there had been a time when she had thought that yearning for home, for Wood and Word would be the worst she could ever feel, that she could never long for anything else so completely.

“When the moogle called me by your name, I was honored. I’ve never held a bounty half so high.”

Fran opens her eyes, unsurprised that the viera looks nothing like her, though of all others it would seem the moogles might be better at telling them apart. Fran has seen no other of her sisters in Archades, the city with too many people and too few trees to provide much to draw them in.

Sije is smoke-dark, with gray spots that trail up the insides of her arms and a star-shaped, pale patch of fur at her throat. It has been years since they have crossed paths, the last on a caravan in the desert, and while Fran took to the skies she has made her name on the ground, with more hunts and more Elite Marks to her name than any other. She is of few words, as always, only a touch at Fran’s arm - I am well, you are well - with no need for further pleasantries. 

“A messenger arrived at the clan hall, looking for you,” Sije hands over the small case, “You’ve been in the city all this time, then? No wonder we could not find you.”

Fran doesn’t know what she means, but for a moment it doesn’t matter, unlatching the case with a spark of hope that blazes higher as she unrolls the map. 

Moogles don’t all know one another, except when they do, and so there is Nono’s handwriting, and a tidy x marks the spot where the Strahl is hidden on the Ozmone plain. A shelter they’ve used before, and an arrow drawn up, to where Balthier has gone - and Fran remembers it, then. The first offer he had made to her, all those years ago, from the other side of a locked door. At the start, how he had wanted her for a particular job. It had been chance that had brought them together, and after a short time Fran considered it fate - but there had been a reason as well, though he had never made mention of it again. 

The arrow points to Giruvegan. 

“It is from your hume?” Sije says, nose crinkling with slight amusement. “You have parted from him, and now he seeks your forgiveness?”

“He left me behind. He did not wish to put me in danger.” Fran says, aware her voice is hollow and harsh but she lacks the strength to lighten it. The humes believe Giruvegan is a place of gods. A myth, a broken city in the Mist, a fable of glory and knowledge and a place foolish men go to die. Her claws dig into the map, remembering all of Balthier’s careful study, the spells, the ancient magicks - he needs her, he was right to wish for her at his side and a damned idiot to push her away now, and anger and fear lash at her to the punishing rhythm of her heart.

“Ajra has gone missing.” Nothing less could have caught her attention, and Fran frowns, confused. It had seemed strange to even see a viera so young outside the Wood, and difficult to imagine she’d turned hunter, that she should have ever put herself in danger.

“We fear she has been taken. I have come here to see what might be found. Tyrn and Aisa are searching as well. Joce seeks her further south. We have heard nothing from Krjn, or her sister.” 

“Ktjn has left the Wood?”

Sije huffs a rueful laugh. “… and at such a time as this.”

The viera protect their own, the responsibility of the exiled to watch out for each other in this world of humes. A rare thing, that anyone dares to attack them for what they are, but there are those in the world who see all things only for what they are worth when possessed, and do not care to hear otherwise. It helps, then, to have the sisterhood outside of the protection of the Wood. If any are harmed, all will know and all will answer, and their judgement will be swift and without mercy. Perhaps it truly is some rich fool, taking advantage of the war to think he might escape unnoticed, with Ajra in his grasp. It is frustrating, that he is not entirely wrong. Surely if there was no conflict, Fran would have known of it already. If things were not as they stand, she would not hesitate a single heartbeat before joining in the hunt. 

“You will go after your hume.” Sije says, no judgment there, even though Fran would not blame her for it.

“He is in danger. I will not abandon him. I cannot…”

The light touch of claws at her arm once more, and Sije nods.

“We do what we must. Elsewise, why would we have left?” She steps back, and so does Fran, for now there is finally a destination, an urgent pull to guide her. “I will send word, when Ajra has been found. Safe hunting, sister.”

\------------------------------

Crumbling pillars rise up out of the haze, and even when she knows they are real Fran approaches them with caution, wary of anything anyone thought wise to build in such a place. The Mist is so thick she wishes to cough, to sweep it away though that will do no good at all. She did not bother seeking out the Strahl, just a word to Nono that she was on her way, and Fran has boarded a dozen ships then, everything from cargo ships to cruising vessels and she notices little of it, only the means to get her past Dalmasca, over sands far distant from the occupiers and the occupied. On the way she asks the same questions, over and over, learning what little there is anyone seems to know of Giruvegan.

A place of secrets, and dangers, and power. Of course it is power, what else do humes long for? The home of the Occuria, all the legends say. Gods, or those powerful enough to be as gods. Giruvegan is the place of their birth, or rule, or exile, depending on the tale and the teller. Under their blessing, their benevolence King Raithwall united all Ivalice beneath a common banner, a time of glory and of true peace. 

Fran cannot imagine Balthier goes there to supplicate, to ask their favor, and she is amazed that she ever thought, even for a moment, that he would simply give up, that he would wreck himself on drink or pity or some other easy vice when there the possibility of this, a war with heaven itself. 

So here she stands in the Feywood on an ancient platform, tall columns rising around her, and words carved into the stone, older than Kildean, older than anything Fran knows. Relics from the lost city? Or created after, in an attempt to breach its gates? Fran turns a full circle in the center, seeing nothing beyond but Mist, wood and stone - there must be a spell, these words she cannot speak, to lead her down the proper path.

She closes her eyes, lets the teasing Mist flow past, searching - a viera knows no labyrinth, no path too tangled or hidden that she cannot find the end of it. If Balthier were here he might make some small comment about her twitching nose and then rub his shoulder when she punched him - she will find him, she will - and a few moments more has her stepping back out into the forest, sure-footed as ever, though she can feel it is not the same land as where she had been, the thought barely strange in such a place as this.

Fran is sure she is going the right way even before she finds the corpse sprawled out across the third dais, blood spattering the columns nearby, the body at most a few days old. Untouched, the unnatural beasts here seek to kill but not to feed, and Fran kneels down beside the fallen Archadian soldier, his thick-plate armor no match for whatever it was that had run him straight through. She wonders how many more soldiers came with him and how far ahead they might be and how Balthier could not be satisfied simply walking headlong into danger if it weren’t also snapping at his heels.

She passes as quickly as she can through a half-dozen gates or more, until finally the woods thin to the remains of a path hewn into the hills, great cliffs that rise and rise and yet never reveal the tops of the trees, the Mist obscuring all even when there is a gap between the stones. Fran climbs for a very long time, in the light-sketched ruin of what must have once been splendid. All that remains now are the barest suggestions, a few stones here and there that must have been vibrantly colored, well-worn crevices that were once beautiful carvings in the cliff walls. 

Everything echoes, so Fran hears them well before she comes upon the camp, a steady stream of voices, sounds of industry and exploration and none of them particularly kind. She finds a narrow path that seems to rise higher than the main, and follows it up, making sure each step is silent, that she does not dislodge so much as a pebble.

The Mist clears before her at the edge of the cliff, at least enough to see a wide, circular plain, pocked with shallow holes and small ponds of murky water, reflecting nothing of the sky with no sky to see. A cluster of men stand in loose formation, a nervous perimeter a few cautious feet from the edge, staring out at nothing. Mercenaries, a ragged band of thieves and jackals that would still call themselves sky pirates though they are nothing like. No sky pirate would ever hire himself out like a dog to the Archadians - and there are more of those as well, a cluster of soldiers in armor near a tent well-marked with crests of high rank. Chocobo carts stacked with supplies, the birds pawing the ground, trilling nervously - they sense it too, this place not at all where any of them should be. Fran cannot feel anything of the world around them, no sense of it, as if they are all suspended in a bubble, and all around them the void and directly across from her the door she has read of, though it seems more like a solid wall, dull and heavy with the weight of ages. 

The Gate of Giruvegan, and few have ever seen it, and none have seen beyond.

A movement from the tent, the gleam of steel plate emerging, a hint of green like slime on river stones, and there is a Judge Magister, truly - with Balthier a step behind, and Ajra stumbling forward, pressing close against his back.

Fran is too stunned to move or think, to wonder how or why. Her sister is bound fast, thick chains around her arms and even thicker manacles at her feet. Balthier seems unrestrained, but he keeps himself close to her, blood on his torn shirt and not quite steady on his feet. A soldier barks out an order and one of the mercenaries grabs Ajra, dragging her back as she cries out, thrashing at her captors to little purpose. Balthier lunges forward, striking the man, only to take a blow from a soldier, and another, down to his knees and Fran’s claws dig into the cliff, barely able to hold herself back. She does not have enough arrows for them all.

The Judge Magister lifts a hand, the soldier stepping back. Fran cannot hear the words he speaks or Balthier’s reply, only the tilt of his head and the bold grin, what Balthier looks like when he knows he ought to be silent, when he knows exactly what not to say. 

The crack of steel on flesh whips his head back as the Judge Magister backhands him to the ground, a parting kick to the ribs from another soldier keeping him there, curled up as the rest move past. Fran looks to where Ajra has been dragged off, huddled around a small fire in the middle of the mercenaries rough camp. It seems she is their prisoner, or hostage, or treasure, and they are not inclined to share. A good chance, then, that Fran will be able convince the mercenaries and the Archadians to turn on each other with little provocation, at least enough for long enough to see her allies free. She will have to reach Balthier first, though she doesn’t understand how he was captured, or why he has not escaped. No eyes are on him now, as he drags himself to his feet, and even another dozen mercenaries could not come close to what he’s found his way around, but Balthier makes no attempt to run. He only straightens painfully, with perhaps a glance at Ajra, and then he’s shuffling slowly to the Gate.

He strays no more than a dozen paces from it for the rest of the day, as the soldiers and the mercenaries shift their positions at the edge of camp, and blessedly Ajra is left alone. Occasionally Fran will see a flash of magic near the Gate, and once Balthier is knocked flat on his back, a jolt from whatever magicks keep Giruvegan locked fast. A few of the mercenaries laugh. No one checks to see if he is injured, or worse, and it is a long moment before he sits up, shaking his head - and returns to his work as if nothing had happened.

Night does not settle here, only an odd dusky twilight that narrows the confines of the camp, with neither mercenary nor Archadian willing to stray too far from their comrades. Balthier never leaves the Gate, a satellite out of orbit with the clusters of men gathered near their fires. The Mist thickens, and continues to rise until finally Fran can move across the clearing without fear of being seen, the torches of the camp only blurred haloes in the eerie, shifting murk. 

“Balthier?”

Every moment since she has stepped into the Feywood is worse than the one before, though nothing so bad, so unnerving as seeing him slumped and resting against the Gate, pressed there with an almost fervent desperation. Fran wonders if she might have to drag him away.

“You bastard, you bastard. How… how did you do it, old man? How?!”

No, not resting, eyes half-open and breathing hard between muttered curses, half lost in dream or delusion and as she steps closer Fran can smell sweat and sickness. It takes him a long time to notice her presence, and even longer to focus his gaze on her. He is dazed and pale - too much magic and not enough food or sleep, with the red and angry marks of foolishly neglected injuries - but his sudden smile is still the same, bright and fearless as a boy’s.

“Now, this I prefer. A thing of beauty, even among the damned. I did miss you.”

He gives her a long look, as if committing her to memory, and then turns away, reaching for a book laying face down in the dust, slowly rising to his feet. He sways, catches himself, and Fran steps closer. He believes she is some Mist wraith, an illusion, and that he is still alone.

“What are you doing, Balthier?”

“Oh, I’m not even certain anymore. Trying to undo what’s been done, what’s been _undone_. Reaching for what will burn me, as if I’m not already on fire. Something with a bit of poetry in it, I’m sure. If I could make it rhyme.” He glances back at her with a much more sickly grin, tapping at the stone with a fingertip. “Hoping whatever’s inside this thing has a taste for Judge Magisters.”

“We must leave this place. We must free Ajra and go.” 

“The viera?” Balthier says, frowning now, beckoning to a thought that refuses to come. “I can save her. I have to open the door and then I’ll save her, before things can go completely to hell. I have to, before… Bergan wants to blast through it with Nethicite, did you know? _Nethicite_! What is the bastard thinking? As if he even knows how to think.” He chuckles, a dark, unnerving sound. “Oh, they’re on to you, old man, aren’t they? You had your hour, but we speak of Archades - name a man who won’t go twice as mad for half the reward - or half a man, twice as fast.”

He is raving, and it frightens her. Fran reaches for him without thinking, and shakes him harder than she means to, enough to hear the tiny grunt of pain. “This is _serious_ , Balthier.”

“Oh no, no. Never take life seriously, Fran. It will kill you if you do.” The skin beneath her hands is blazing hot, and for one moment Fran thinks she has come too late, that her ignorance has cost her everything - and then he blinks, and looks to where she is touching him, and up into her eyes.

“Fran?”

He might very well fall, were she not there to support him, and though Balthier does not move away Fran does not lie to herself, that it is less relief than that he lacks the strength to do much of anything at all. Balthier licks his lips, glancing over his shoulder toward the faint glow of the lights, pulling himself back into the now. He looks at her, and the Gate, and she feels the flinch, the horrifying realization of the state she has found him in.

“Get the girl, Fran, and get her out. Right now.”

“Yes. We are leaving.”

Balthier pulls away, or tries to, but this time she does not let go.

“I’m not worth - you need to protect her. You shouldn’t even - I’m _not_ …”

It’s more than that. He _wants_ to stay. A gamble he cannot win and why, why does he not even seem to _care_?

“Is it power that keeps you here?” Fran gestures to the Gate, “Is this what you’ve wished for, all along?”

“No!” A truth so fierce, hissed out between clenched teeth as if Balthier has had this fight with himself many times before. Here it is, what has been between them all this time, in the trembling shoulders under her hands. Fran rubs a thumb gently in the too-deep hollow near his throat, whip-taut muscles shifting, tense enough to wince as he turns his face away. 

“Why, Balthier?”

Is it weakness or anger that sees him this shaken? Sickness or fury, to make his eyes flash, as if Balthier could hate her for not hating him.

“It’s not a matter of wishing, or wanting. It never has been - can’t you see? How can you not see it, Fran? It’s all around you, and you still - don’t you understand what I _am_?!”

“I understand,” Fran says, her eyes fixed on his, “Judge Bunansa, I _know_.” 

One breath, two, and he turns so pale it’s amazing she can’t see right through him, as if he is just one more trick of the fog. 

He is Balthier - for now and always her Balthier, no matter the name he takes, no matter who he is or was or what was left behind. As constant as any truth she has ever known, and Fran would tell him so, that there is no use in continuing to pay this brutal penance, least of all to her.

She would say it, except that the silence around them has changed, even the smallest whisper gone silent. If Fran had been paying attention, she would have noticed it already, would have thought of dangers past those even a Judge Magister might present. A good chance it would not have mattered much, a few moments’ preparation little use against the nightmare that comes roaring at them out of the Mist.


	7. Chapter 7

There is some small consolation, Fran thinks, that though Giruvegan holds the promise of certain death it will at least be beautiful when it comes.

The massive beasts remind her a little of the great lizards that wander through the wildest parts of the Dalmascan sands, though these move with far more swiftness and grace. Steeped in the Mist from the moment of their creation, they glow and shimmer as if lit from within. All shadow and light and lethal elegance, but the furrows their great claws dig into the stone are quite real. The sound of their singing makes her shiver, a high and tuneless keening that fractures into a burst of staccato chirps. An almost delicate cry, utterly at odds with the way each heavy step makes the ground quaver. The Mist sweeps forward with them, their massive heads swaying and darting with swift curiosity as they observe those who have intruded upon their kingdom.

All the world pauses, waiting, the Archadians unmoving, even the pirates shocked into silence. Her senses are always keen, but in this moment Fran can see the tiniest flicker of light on the Judge Magister’s armor, as his hand shifts ever so slightly for his sword. She listens to Balthier breathing, the odd hitch that speaks of bruised if not fractured ribs. Fran can even hear the brush of his fingers against his side, reaching automatically for the gun that isn’t there.

It rests in the hands of a mercenary now, and she recognizes the crack of the shot as it echoes through the trees, a panicked attack that will do no good at all. A chocobo screams, and a lizard roars, the sound shaking everything - ground and air and flesh to the bone - with the Judge Magister’s spell roaring across the stone, shocking the world into action.

A dangerous gamble to use magic here, with the Mist so thick. If it were Fran’s battle among her own people, she and her sisters would soon scatter. They would not think to challenge the beasts and certainly not on such open ground. Only one of her kin is among them, though, and the prisoner of those nowhere near as swift as she. Fran trusts Balthier to keep his distance, hopes that sickness and injury will dissuade him from further heroics, all her focus shifting to the battle breaking out in front of her, though even her keen eyes can pick out no sign of Ajra in the rising mayhem.

The Archadians fight as professionals, even against such a nightmarish foe, the Judge Magister roaring out orders as his men attempt to hold their ranks. Unfortunately for them, the mercenaries they hired share neither such legacy nor loyalty, and Fran watches one of the armored men near the camp fall, taken down by a blade from behind, the pirate loading up from the nearest crate only to be felled by one of his own, snatching the coin from his hands well before he’s hit the ground. It’s every man to his own survival now, greed and panic swiftly splintering a line that was never going to hold for long, with the lizards darting into the middle of the camp heedless of sword or shield. Soldiers fly through the air, the sounds of metal crumpling mixed with screams as enormous jaws rend through plate armor in a single bite. The panicked chocobos finally break free from their harness, screeching in terror, one of the monsters dropping what’s left of a soldier’s body to snap after it, catching nothing but the end of a few tail feathers. 

Fran moves swiftly, for a time going entirely unnoticed through the chaos of the camp. It is almost amusing, when the first man finally turns on her, his sword drawn, eyes quickly going wide in surprise and confusion. If he had been prepared Fran still would have taken him, his shock simply makes the victory an instant one. A few steps more and she’s fully amidst the Archadians, trading wild blows with mercenaries and soldiers and trying to keep an eye out for the massive beasts still charging, still roaring, cutting vast swaths of carnage through all that remains. 

It isn’t just their size or their speed that makes them dangerous - Fran watches as one of the beast turns, his tail passing fully _through_ cringing man, only to turn solid and slam into him as it lashes back around. A moment later and the beast is insubstantial again, a soldier thrusting his sword through hide no thicker than a wisp of fog. 

The beasts not only live within the Mist, at a whim it seems they are Mist itself, shifting from deadly to untouchable in a heartbeat. As if Fran needed any more convincing that there was no winning this, that the only thing to do was find Ajra and run. Still no sign of the other viera, and nimble as she is her progress is slowed, dodging spells and gunfire, the ground trembling in a steady rhythm beneath her feet. Fire lashes out in front of her, and Fran hears a man’s scream, an unfortunate brigand caught full-force in the spell. Unfortunately, it seems such magicks also attract the monsters, and Fran finds herself at once the object of very large attention, the creature giving the air an oddly comic sniff, roaring at her as it charges. 

A hume might stand frozen, their life flashing before them, but Fran is all steadiness, watching the sway of its gait, measuring the distance until the great jaws are plunging down upon her. A quick flip leaves her planting a hand on its nose, another jump poised just above the lashing tail, less moving herself than using its momentum against it, and as she lands lightly on the ground in its wake Fran finally hears the high scream - not hume, but kin. 

Ajra struggles with one of the mercenaries near what she realizes are smaller sky bikes tucked away behind a tent, a few of the men using the distraction to load up what they can on the Archadian machines and make a dash to freedom. The viera sees her, eyes wide with fear and shock a moment before the man strikes her from behind with a vicious blow. She staggers, sagging backwards as he throws her roughly over his shoulder. 

Fran’s vision goes sharp and sparkling clear. She will free her Wood-sister from his filthy hands and make such a lesson of him that no one will dare to touch a viera for the next thousand years. Everything in her burns with anger and Mist-kissed vengeance and that is why she makes no note of the battle waging behind her, why she sees and hears none of it until the Judge Magister is thrown off his feet by the wild lashing of a tail as thick as a tree-trunk. He slams into her, sending them both down hard to the ground.

The Archadian has a short blade slashing up at her even as he seeks to untangle himself, and Fran rakes his armor with her claws, knocking the weapon it from his grasp. A shudder from the ground beneath them is the only warning, and she pushes off and away even as he draws his sword and the great lizard charges in. It has him, surely, but at the last moment the Judge Magister shifts nimbly out of the way, deflecting the brunt of the charge with a swing of his sword that somehow manages not to tear his arm from his body. It is not enough to hurt the beast, but it is far more than anyone else has managed, and the lizard actually stumbles to a halt, shaking its great muzzle in stunned surprise. 

He turns to face her, igniting a spell but Fran is quick to counter before he can draw up too much power. The monster roars again, and for the briefest of moments Fran is both battling the Judge Magister and fighting by his side, each of them hoping the other might finally draw the beast’s full attention as they dodge and strike and dodge again. In the space between charges, he lashes out with his sword as Fran twists away, her kick to his kneecap deflected at the last moment. He’s as fast as he is powerful, she will not deny him that, as the sound of claws on stone has them both leaping back, their fight once again interrupted by the flashing wall of fangs.

One swift glance confirms her worst fears. Ajra is gone now, along with several of the mercenaries and all they could steal away. The sounds of battle are slowly fading, anyone remaining either dead or dying or fled, and even as Fran thinks it the other beast appears, circling closer. It sports a long score along its side though there is no sign of blood, no weariness or strain or anything so mortal. 

She is panting slightly, a few scrapes and bruises - far better than the bodies strewn around her but Fran does not think she could win this if time were infinite, and even a viera cannot fight quite that long. Behind her, she can hear the Judge Magister shifting his stance, and he will kill her at her first mistake, no doubt of that. Fran prepares herself for his next charge, cannot afford to think further than it, and only hope some opportunity will present itself.

The massive spell that arcs through the Mist, knocking one beast into the next and sending them both sprawling would surely count as such, were it not for the source.

What Fran feels is not surprise, or it is a shock is so well-leavened with dread there is no telling one from the other. Foolish of her to once again forget about Balthier, to think that being half-dead would somehow keep him from the fight, keep him from the eye of this mad storm. Of course he would be here, and of course he would be standing atop the Archadians’ surrogate plan, should his attempt at the Gate fail. 

Balthier straddles a bomb, and Fran has no doubt he has been there long enough to see it primed and ready, not with the tiny sparks already shooting out through the slats in the wood crate around it. A strange, flickering haze curls out beneath his feet, the Mist twisting in glowing, swirling eddies, responding with increasing violence to the growing power.

He has a smile on his face, smug and certain and satisfied as if this in any way resembles a plan. He seems so certain, and Fran wants nothing more than to believe she is not about to watch him die, or perhaps to kill them all.

The lizards roar, and charge, and Balthier drops to one knee, still grinning like a lunatic. Fran feels it happen more than seeing, sense-blind and knocked right off her feet as the Mist around her is suddenly ripped away, vanishing so quickly it is as if the breath has been ripped from her lungs, her whole body trembling from the force of it. All that magic, all that power condensing down to a single point, right beneath where Balthier kneels. Where the beasts are nearly upon him and the shadowy afterimage of that, of Balthier curled around the very heart of that inferno is burned into her mind’s eye the instant before the Nethicite explodes, shattering the world past oblivion.

—————————————-

Fran comes to herself blinking back nothingness, fully blind for an alarming moment before she realizes it is simply dust in the air. An opaque haze coating her fur and the back of her throat in equal measure. She can just make out the bare shadow of the Gate through the cloud - no doubt it stands serene and untouched, no matter how many deep cracks there are in the stone beneath her hands. Fran tries, and fails to lift herself up, remnants of Mist lashing at her like tongues of flame. She winces, coughing, fighting to force the burning maelstrom back into sense. 

Slowly, very slowly, she begins see where the new edge of the world has been marked, those trees that had once lined the border now bare and black. Everything stands silent, even the creatures of the Feywood rendered dumb and timid against such terrible power, no sign at all of the Mist lizards. Likely they are less than the dust beneath her hands.

Resting here, between the gods of old and their Gate, and the terrible ambition of the Archadians, Fran wonders if anything at all can survive.

The cough rings out into the quiet like some profound announcement, and it might as well be, the last sound Fran ever thought to hear. It is a struggle just to lift her head, a strain to look through the still-clearing smoke, and even more so when she sees the figure who stands there, dusting himself off, gazing around blearily.

Balthier, who cannot be alive. Who can never be most of the things he always is.

He looks around, rubbing at his eyes, and finally sees her. Relief and worry replace a good deal of weariness - before the slow shift to blank surprise. 

He jerks back slightly, and Fran does not understand, cannot place the sound of the pistol shot until she sees the red stain spreading across his shirt. It is violently bright, the only point of color in a world coated gray, and she strains with all she has to rise, to move, but her body refuses to obey her. She can do nothing, even as Balthier staggers, looking blankly to where the Judge Magister paces forward, tossing his gun away, obviously preferring to end it with the sword.

Balthier takes one step back, and then another, and with no sound and no fanfare he is gone, dropped right off the edge of the broken world. 

Fran waits, every breath a painful effort, as the Judge Magister leans over the edge. She waits for the next miracle, for Balthier to reappear, for the final piece of his grand plan. But Balthier is not hiding where he surely must be, does not reach up to pull the Judge off the edge, does not ambush this Bergan as he surveys the remains of his expedition. His eyes sweep right over Fran as she lies prone, covered in dust and debris - and she waits for anything, but there is no sign and no sound save for, finally, that of the Judge Magister’s footsteps as he strides away. 

———————————————-

Halfway down the cliff, picking her way across the crumbling stone and a few wide, twisting roots that work as the only decent place to catch her claws, Fran finally bothers to think about what she’s doing, and how pointless it is. Balthier is dead, seeing it up close will change nothing, can only make the unbearable hurt that much more. Even if the shot hadn’t killed him, this is much too far a height to fall and survive, even for a wind-touched, foolish boy. It will be exactly as it was with the hume in the Wood, Balthier still and silent with his neck snapped and she does not want to see that. Fran knows she does not, even as hand follows hand and she sets each foot down carefully, never pausing in her descent. 

Ajra needs her now, desperately, and Fran risks all this for no reason, wasting time she cannot afford when there will be plenty of it later for grieving. When she knows, she _knows_ seeing him now will make it no easier to believe he is truly gone. It is a good argument, rational and just, and even Balthier would point out the sense in it - and does she even believe for a moment that she can even carry his body out, as difficult as it was to even reach this place?

Fran turns her attention back to the blank stone wall, and a part of her hopes she might just climb down forever, that beneath the fog lies only an endless path of handholds for her to focus on, and nothing more. All too soon, though, she hits the forest floor, and it does not take very long at all to find Balthier. What remains of him, crumpled against a rock, a sad mockery of his best lazy sprawl. She ignores the tears that fall, aware that this is not yet even mourning, that it’s little more than the battle she’s recovering from, the Nethicite that has her so weary and shaken - this is not true sorrow, not yet.

Balthier’s eyes are open, the once-sharp gaze now glassy and gone, focused on some far-distant shore, and she kneels, reaching out for him. So many things she cannot bear, and this the only one she can change.

Fran’s claws brush his cheek, and Balthier blinks. For one horrified instant, she thinks of other kinds of monsters, of the Feywood twisting his body into something terrible and dark. Slowly though, with effort, his gaze focuses on her and there is no mistaking it. No sound that can touch her like the wry, familiar warmth in his voice, even weak as it is.

“The less said about this one, the better, I think.”

“… Balthier?”

“Fran.” He blinks again, glancing around, “We _are_ alive, aren’t we?”

“How,” she whispers. “How did you…?”

He has an arm against his stomach, and she fears some further injury until he turns his hand out, revealing a large piece of magicite clutched fast - the better part of a floatstone, from one of the heavier crates the Archadians had brought with them, and he must have swiped it from the wreckage somewhere along the way, clinging to it as he fell.

“An old mechanic’s trick. It slows you down enough, sometimes, with a bit of luck,” he shifts, letting out a tight grunt of pain, “depending on one’s definition of the word.”

Fran’s claws make quick work of the fabric at his shoulder. The wound is clean, thankfully, the bullet passed right through the other side, but Balthier wasn’t in the best shape before this fight had its way with him. His eyes are still far too bright, skin afire as she presses her hand down hard against the wound. Healing him takes more time than it ought, the magic trickling out in a sluggish draught between her fingers.

“The Mist isn’t going to do you any favors here, what’s left of it.” He flinches as it surges and fades, and she frowns, still in the Wood and very young the last time she’d had a spell fight her so. “Are you all right, Fran?”

“How are you alive? The explosion… how did you survive?” It’s easier than answering him, easier than dealing with the aftershocks of fear and fight and the certainty of his death, with the way her flayed nerves are still aching from the shocking disappearance of the Mist and the wildfire that swept over her in its wake. 

“I figured the Nethicite might catch the beasts out, no matter where they tried to hide. It… such an explosion displaces the power stored when the crystal absorbs Mist, releasing it all in a go. In the very center, where the pull and push cancel each other out - it’s the only safe place to be. The eye of the storm,” Balthier grins. “At least in theory. I never had a chance to test it until now. A shame it couldn’t deprive us of Bergan’s company as well.”

He leans back, as she finishes what she can of the healing, a miserly effort but no more magic to be wrung from the air. His skin has knitted together but barely, still angry and red and Balthier is trembling all over, his eyes closed. She does not want to stay here, the forest around them far darker than it had been above, and every inch as inhospitable. Whatever beasts the fight had scattered, it cannot keep them at a distance forever, but she doesn’t know if moving him will cause further harm. 

“Ajra,” Balthier’s eyes snap open, answering that question for her. In another moment he is struggling to sit up, to get to his feet, “we have to get her back.”

“We will,” Fran says, and moves to help him rise when it is clear he has no intention of taking any more time to recover. He flinches, when her hand slides against his back, and she could take it for pain when he shudders, so close to her, though his gaze betrays him, as does the way he quickly averts his eyes.

“I know where they’re going. It’s the Grays, it has to be. If we could…” He glances up at the cliff, and Fran doubts she could make the climb were it her alone. Balthier quickly comes to the same conclusion. “Damn. I might have been able to salvage a ride.”

“You do have a talent.” 

Oh, and how he freezes up at that - remembering what he is, and how she knows _exactly_ what he is now. The ghosts of an entire empire hang between them, so many secrets peeking from the edges of each glance and gesture, asking to be named. Whatever he believes, Fran does not desire to hear the whole of it, at least not as much as she thinks he needs to tell her. It weighs on him, as easy to see now as any sign of illness or injury, and she leans forward, pressing her brow gently to his. 

“It changes nothing, Balthier.”

He is quiet, and perhaps he does not believe her or perhaps he is simply summoning whatever strength remains to put one foot in front of the other. She can feel the heat radiating from him even as she draws away, and his first step comes with no small effort. Balthier sways slightly, hands clenched and Fran ready to catch him - but he keeps his feet, and she moves to follow. The trees are silent, this is not the Wood and even if it were she abandoned it willingly long ago, but Fran still closes her eyes for a moment, petitioning into that stillness for whatever she can.

_If not for my sake, then for Ajra… please. Please hear me… your children have need of you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right so I was wrong with this chapter being the last. I swear we are getting there.


	8. Chapter 8

“Wait, Fran. Where… we can’t… We can’t just…”

Balthier startles suddenly from his daze, trying to pull away from her, too weak to manage more than a few steps. He looks around in confusion, and who knows what he sees, or thinks he sees.

“It’s the Feywood, Balthier,” she reminds him, “We must find a way out.”

“Oh,” He frowns, trying to gather his thoughts, no sign that she’s told him this twice already, “Wait. I know… I know where they’re taking her. It’s the Grays, it has to be. We have to get her back.”

If it came from anyone else, the reminder would be the gravest kind of insult. If Balthier did not mark every hour that passes with the same urgency, the same near-desperate vow.

“We will, Balthier.”

Carefully, she coaxes him forward, focusing on each step. If he were to fall now, Fran doesn’t think she could get him back up and moving again.

“I’m sorry, Fran. I’m sorry.”

By blessing or skill or simply blind luck, the way out remains clear. Or perhaps the whole of the Feywood is well aware of the destruction at the heart of their wood, and who is to blame. Fran might feel a bit of shame at that, at her part in it, but for the moment just moving forward demands all her concentration. Balthier had pushed as hard as he was able for as long as he could, limping resolutely at her side, biting off curses when he stumbled on the uneven path. He’s well past that now, one arm around her waist and leaning heavily against her, so hot where his skin touches hers and the both of them soaked in sweat. 

He murmurs softly to himself now and then, and even with his eyes closed and strength waning his jaw is clenched fast, forcing himself through what Fran now knows is an unspoken penance. The same as it has been from the first moment they’d met.

“I’m sorry.” He says once and again as they walk, as she scans the path ahead for danger, as she rests and hopes and coaxes him to drink at least a few spare sips. Apologies for leaving her or allowing Ajra to be stolen or being an Archadian or all of this and more. 

“It’s all right.”

“You don’t understand… I… you don’t…”

“Shhh.”

Fran brushes her lips against his temple, shifts her hold, and keeps moving. 

It’s dusk again, a full day gone by the time they reach the Strahl, and she has sense enough to see the gangplank down and the pale blurs of the moogles rushing forward. Fran hands Balthier off to them even as she drops to her knees, watching the gleam of healing magic quicken the air as they carry him off. She remembers what follows only in flashes - draining a waterskin dry, and then another, with hoarse instructions to Nono in between. Trembling like a newly hatched chocobo as she finds her feet again, staggering to the cockpit before she can think the better of it. Knowing there is nothing she can do in such a state, that her own quarters are the far better idea - but even as she thinks it Fran is asleep in the first chair to catch her.

————————————

The thrum of the engine comes to her first, but it is the sound of quiet conversation that keeps her from moving, eyes closed for just a moment longer. Allowing the peace of it to steady her, to seep through her like rain. A feeling closer to calm than she has known in a long time, since Nabudis. At last, Fran is content to open her eyes and linger on the sight - both familiar and strange - of a half-dozen of her kin all gathered together in the cockpit. 

Sunlight gleams off several shades of armor and fur - Tyrn is sharpening the tips of her arrows while Aisa and Joce speak quietly, tucked against the wall and studying a map. Ljen - oh, and Fran has not seen her in what feels a lifetime - sits in the pilot’s seat, claws tapping lightly at the controls, and though she does not take her eyes off the sky, though no one glances her way they know she is awake. A subtle welcome in the turn of a shoulder, the slight shift of an ear, so soft and so familiar Fran cannot help but ache.

“How long?”

“A day and half again.” Sije says from the floor behind her. “I was with Tyrn and Joce when we got the call from your pilot.”

“Balthier?” Fran rouses a bit further. So rare to see the Strahl in flight without his hand to guide her, yet Ljen is alone.

“The moogle. Your hume is still sleeping - Joce’s healing did well for his wounds, but they were grave enough and… strange.”

“Nethicite.” Fran says, and needs say no more. The dangerous hubris of humes has never been in question, even from the viera who choose to live among them, when it seems the only thing they learn from disaster is how to improve upon it, to make sure tomorrow’s consequences will far outstrip today’s. Flip the coin, though, and Balthier is on the other side. A child of their training, their ambitions - and because of those the Strahl hums around her now, all she could wish of hearth and home.

As if her thoughts have conjured him, Balthier appears at the door of the cockpit. He looks pale yet, frayed at the edges and badly in need of a shave, though Fran cannot smell new sickness on him, or even the sharp-bitter tang of Nethicite, the acid-edged numbness where the sense of it ought to be. For a moment, his eyes hold some hint of the old spark of humor, wry amusement as he looks over their new collection of guests, and he seems about to speak. It hurts, to watch the moment pass, all expression draining away as Balthier remembers what they are there to do. He looks out instead through the Strahl’s front window, eyes fixing on a distant mark. His jaw sets again in that same determined line, more severe each time she sees it, and Fran turns to follow his gaze as the edge of their destination comes into view. Deep grooves in the earth, stretching out as if the whole of the land had been gripped in the talons of some impossible beast.

The Graylands are a dead space, pitted and barren, a vast expanse at the edge of Archadia’s western steppes. Hardly lands at all, only canyons, jagged, narrow chasms of dark rock widening into dull and lifeless plains. Dust scours at indifferent stone, the air thick and the sky ever leaden, lightning flickering in endless jagged strokes against clouds that seem welded to the horizon

A place no one could possibly have use for, save that the land is so parched and lifeless that metal cannot rust away. Discarded airships can be laid to rest here for ages without showing much in the way of wear. An Archadian flag marks the edge of the territory they bother to patrol, where whole ships are carefully tended for reuse, retired for the occasional parade or slowly taken to pieces. The rest of the canyon is a maze of uncharted spaces, where less valuable ships have simply been discarded, the bones of a country’s rise to power left scattered in haphazard carrion pits. Only the worst of the outcast - those too feral and ruthless for even the lowest of ports - would consider this a place to call home.

“I can think of a few places to start, the more established holds,” Balthier says, making a few quick marks on Aisa’s map - and Fran wonders if he’s been through these lands in the past, as Judge or… whatever came before. He glances up at her as if she’d asked aloud, and drops his eyes back to the map before she can speak. 

“I saw the brands on the men, back in the camp. Marks of exile, though they wear them with pride, and pretend to live here by choice. I never thought I’d see a Judge Magister stoop so low, employing those so vile that even their fellow brigands have no use for them,” Balthier frowns. “I haven’t been here in… some time. I don’t know how large their numbers have grown, or what we might be walking into.”

“It is of little consequence.” Sije says calmly, neither boast nor threat but simple fact. A thousand men would not stop any one of the viera from saving one of their own, and those same thousand men stand little chance of stopping six of her kin all devoted to a goal.

Six viera and one sky pirate, Fran amends, though Balthier is hardly recovered from his time in Giruvegan. She would argue that he has done enough, that he needs not risk himself at this, though she doubts anything short of locking him in his quarters and having the moogles weld the door closed could persuade him to agree. 

“It is of no consequence if we cannot find her.” Tyrn says, “Searching all of these places will take time we do not have, and if they learn we are looking they may move on and take Ajra with them.”

Ljen brings the ship into its descent, the walls of the canyon rising up around them, and the tension seems to thicken around them even as the world slips into shadow. Two days already, nearly three, and the thought of even one more passing without their kinswoman safe is nearly unbearable.

“We will track her,” Joce says, “the humes were not on foot, but there may yet be signs.”

“Signs… oh, I’m a fool - they took the bikes. The damned _bikes_.” Balthier says with a sudden, fierce smile, “Archadian craft, fitted to withstand the mysteries of the Feywood… and the treasures they thought to pry from Giruvegan.” He’s waiting for her to understand, but Fran can only shake her head, still a little tired, still shaking off the effects of-

“Nethicite.”

He nods. “Wherever they’re hiding, they would have flown right there…”

It’s impossible not to notice Nethicite when it is active, the way it lights up even the barest tendrils of Mist like wildfire. It will leave a trail, and if the engines were even slightly damaged by what Balthier had done it would be a path that could linger for days, and miles, with no hume the wiser. It’s the best they’re going to get, and Fran can only hope it will be what they need. Ljen eases the ship into its landing, and Sije and Tyrn are out the door and off the Strahl before it can even touch down.

———————————————-

The names humes give to the world around them are oft odd and curious things, but if the viera had found this place, Fran thinks they would have called it the same - if they had bothered with a name at all. Everything in the Graylands, from ground to sky, is some variation on the same dull shade, the canyon walls mottled dark, with thick veins of cloudy quartz buckling out here and there. All of it coated with a thick layer of dust that Fran quickly finds herself wearing as well. The shadows are deep, though the air seems none the cooler for it. It smells only of metal and emptiness, with a stale, dry heat that has her wishing for a breeze. Fran wonders where Ajra is, if it is enough comfort for her to know that they are coming, that they will not stop - never stop - until she is safe.

The other viera are already gone, tracking through the canyons as swiftly as they can, searching out any trace of Nethicite. Balthier has recovered some, though he could never think to match a viera even at his best. Fran does not exactly shadow him, a fair measure of space between them, though every inch of it is full of questions, of that history they still pretend not to see. Now is not the time, though she thinks she has already waited too long.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says quietly, not looking at her. “Staying here, with me. You don’t have to.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Fran replies, just as quietly, “just as you did not have to join us.”

“Whatever wreck these fools have patched together to call a fortress, I’ll make sure you get inside. Give me a little time, and I’ll bring it right down on their heads.”

The place they’d landed the Strahl was mostly barren, though as they make their way further toward a space the canyons meet, Fran sees more and more scrap piled up in the crevices, against the high walls of stone. Sheets of metal and bent girders, fragments of innumerable airships pulled to pieces and laid bare, the remains piled in haphazard, twisted constructions. A few long girders rise up here and there, still connected to one or two supporting arches. In the right light they gleam in nearly the same tawny shade as the canyon itself, as if they’ve grown here, the strangest kind of forest. An odd beauty to their forms, even broken as they are a certain grace yet lingers.

“You see that?” Balthier says, gesturing to a long span of metal in the middle distance, twisted at a few odd angles and burnished dark as if pulled from long-dead ashes. “It’s from Landis. One of their cruisers, or what’s left of her. The front half’s missing, but they didn’t bother with the back - you can tell by that ridge at the top, the curve of it - old design. Even at its prime they were antiquated, and the main beam - Landis steel was weak, and her builders spent too much time compensating for it, just to get her airborne. It’s not even worth pulling down…” Balthier trails off, and this is not the first time he’s regaled her with some trivia of the ships but it means more now than it ever did. “Archadia sunk her here after the war. Stripped her, and sunk her.”

Fran doesn’t see what he sees, the sense of it - it is the Wood to him, each strut and join as known and familiar to him as the trees are to her, the ghosts of these ships telling him their stories. 

“You have been here before?”

The ghost of a boyish grin, and he glances down and away. “Time in the Grays is a fair punishment for all kinds of minor infractions. Insubordination. _Excessive_ insubordination. I think they would have posted me here permanently, were it not for my…” he stops, and swallows hard. “I was a child, though, the first that I came here - the first time of many.”

“Insubordination?”

He chuckles at that, slight but honest. “I’m sure it was considered, but no. It’s only a punishment to be _left_ here. The place is more lively than you’d think, if you visit at the proper hour.” He grins again at her dubious look. “The Grays are borderland - most everyone dumps what they don’t want somewhere in these valleys, even the Rozarrians, which means if you can get out here with an arc welder and a few spare stones after a fresh ship’s been dropped…” It’s a good memory, she can tell by the glint in his eyes. “You’ll have whole teams swarming what’s left, taking whatever they can get to build with on the cheap. Merchants, racing teams, scrap dealers - anyone who can will show up to take what they can get. We’d cheat, and bribe the off-duty soldiers to come act as our bodyguards, to keep it mostly safe while we worked.”

It’s been near silent as they’ve walked through the chasm, only the wind brushing dust over steel and stone, though Balthier has been tense all this time, gun drawn at his side, keeping his voice down. The further they go, the larger the piles of metal become, spilling out onto the plain, with far more places for men to hide. Fran keeps a close watch for even the slightest hint of movement, but there is nothing. Just silence, the sound of their footsteps and Balthier breathing - until even that breath catches in his throat, and he stops moving as the canyon opens up in front of them. 

So many ships, so much history stretched out before them, but Fran knows what he’s looking at because she’s looking too - a wreck near the distant edge. Heavily damaged, though what remains of its outer hull hasn’t been removed. Enough to see the remnants of a crest still etched across its side - the Nabradian royal seal.

“It’s the _Khiimori_. The imperial flagship. I wonder how close it was to the center of the city. I wonder where…” Balthier murmurs, his voice shaken, speaking mostly to himself. “You can see where the engine… gods, it nearly tore her in half.” 

Now Fran understands the extent of the destruction, the way nearly all of the underside of the ship seems to be missing, thick dark marks against the paneling from a series of concussive blasts, as if it had been broadsided once and again. 

“The skystones.” Balthier says, following along her line of thought as he so often does. “All the auxiliary skystones shattered, right along with the main engine. Every bit of magic on board just… detonated. They must have brought her here to study her, though I can’t imagine… just to lift her, alone…” 

No guard posted that she can see, but why would they bother? It came from Nabudis, far more to that curse than the usual superstition. Even the blackest of hearts would not be foolish enough to go near it - though Balthier would, she can see it in his eyes. If she were not here, if this were some other day and some other time - and maybe this is what he means to apologize for, and perhaps she can see why he would.

Fran hears footsteps too light for the ears of humes, though Sije deliberately makes more noise as she approaches, just enough to announce herself. No one speaks, this is hunting as the viera do, to know with a glance that their quarry has been found, and even Balthier keeps his silence, gesturing to Sije to lead the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just splitting this up so the last chapter isn't way too big.


	9. Chapter 9

The fortress is exactly as Balthier said it would be - wrought from ruin, with walls reinforced with the plating from countless smaller ships. Its main bulk is a dreadnought folded nearly in half against the canyon wall, the tail end rising up in an odd, skeletal curve. A good place, no doubt, for one or two lookouts watching ships come and go overhead, and presenting an overall impression little more inhabited than the wrecks that surround it. Fran can sense the Nethicite as they approach, practically taste it - Ajra is here, certainly. The viera have tucked themselves behind the better part of what had once been a Dalmascan transport, on the opposite side of the valley, and between the dun of their fur and the gleam of armor against the metal of the ships that surround them they are all but invisible.

“It’s an old Rozarrian castoff - they convert them into freighters and passenger ships once they’ve been decommissioned.” Balthier says, studying the ship through a split in the steel, “the skystone cracked, most likely, and they’re siphoning off power from what’s left of the main engine.”

He is drawing in the dust, a simple diagram of the inside of the ship. Sketching out a plan of attack - and Fran knows they’ve stolen onto ships like these, one heist or another, but he is not the sky pirate tonight. He is the soldier, the leader of men, and it would seem a dark mirror against those carefree times except there had never been carefree times, she knows that now. Balthier had laughed and gambled and made merry, pirate and hero and knave, but always for him it had come back to this. No matter how long the line, it had always stretched back to the same anchor, to Archadia.

“A ship that size, there could be a hundred men or more aboard. I’m guessing they have someone to keep the lights working, but no one who really knows how she’s put together. The security doors, the locks - they’d have left those open when they decommissioned her, but there’s no reason they shouldn’t still function. Little use for them but in an emergency - but if I can get to the right place, and break up their numbers... it will improve our odds.”

Joce is pacing, and Aisa spins an arrow deftly between her fingers. All eager to get Ajra back, but they know the benefit of patience, of making all opportunities their own. 

Deep as the canyons are, it does not take long for twilight to fall and give them the best chance they’re going to get. The brigands do not guard themselves as if they expect any sort of attack, certain their reputation and their numbers will protect them. As the darkness settles there are even fewer men on any kind of patrol, and Fran can pick out the sounds of bottles clinking, drunken voices calling to each other as a few faint lights flare up against the darkness. An odd anger rises inside of her, that such unworthy enemies could do so much harm. 

It feels good, the clean burn of rage, and stays with her as Tyrn takes the first one they reach, claws in his throat from behind, and he falls without a sound. Swift arrows drop the next three, slumping over their posts nearly all in the same breath, and Fran herself fires the final smooth shot through the darkness, catching the topmost lookout at the edge of his post. He topples forward, over the railing, and Balthier catches the body with a spell just before it can hit the ground, setting it silently in the dust.

Skybikes are scattered around the entrance, including the stolen Archadian ships, and Balthier quickly moves from each to each, a moment’s sabotage against the possibility of escape.

“The Nethicite?” Fran says.

“In the cores - where it will have to stay.” He says, “Nethicite is tricky, and they like it that way. Try to remove it, even crack it open for a look and the whole thing will go off. It’s not quite a bomb, but still… unpleasant,” he sighs, rising from the last of the ships, “too bad these fools didn’t think to try it.”

One of the fools spots them as they reach the entrance, his hand rising and ready to shout an alarm - Joce’s arrow silences him before it can begin. Balthier is searching the body for information, Tyrn with one hand against the door when the sound hits, a distant roar that shakes both steel and sky. Half-howl and half-scream, and even Sije is unnerved by it.

“Well, _that’s_ not on my map.” Balthier says softly.

——————————————-

Once the ship had been fitted for combat, though it is the scraps and fragments of its second, more luxurious life that cling to it still. Scraps of colorful paper on half-rotted walls, the plush carpeting all but undone by wear, filth and time. The familiar smell of metal is cut by the stink of unwashed hume and drink, machine oil and blood and countless miseries. The main hallway branches off in a few large rooms, empty now, perhaps used to offload their most recent cargo - and Fran does not let herself think on it, what will happen if Ajra has been taken elsewhere. 

No sign of the beast that had made such a violent cry, though there is nothing to do but keep moving forward, to get what is theirs and get out before they can find out what it is. Hume voices finally carry from the other side of a door, and Sije kicks it wide open. The four men are chatting around what must be one of the main radios - three of them die before they have a chance to do more than look up in surprise. The fourth makes a lunge for the radio, or what might be an alarm, only to stop at the click of Balthier’s pistol against his temple.

“The viera you stole.” Balthier says with murderous calm, ”where is she?”

“I… I don’t… I don’t…”

“Fran, do something terrible to his vital organs.”

“Wait!” The man howls, before she can even take a step forward, “wait. She’s in the main hall, Jacus keeps her with him in the main hall. You won’t get to her, though, he’s got more than half the crew in there. Court’s in session.”

Balthier nods slightly. “Take off your coat.”

“What?”

“Start with his kidneys, Fran.”

“Gods’ balls, fine! Fine! Take it.” He pulls it off, handing it over, looking warily between the viera, “Now, are you going to-”

Balthier snaps his hand around fast, pistol cracking against the man’s head hard enough that he hits the desk before falling to the floor. He shrugs the coat on, quickly dismantling the radio, pocketing several pieces before checking the fallen man, stripping him of a short knife and a ring of keys, anything that might prove useful. Maybe, Fran thinks, he is not just the soldier now - perhaps this is the Judge Bunansa of old. Cold and determined, with a gaze that lets nothing in. 

“Our plan?” Sije asks him, as the other viera quickly retrieve their arrows.

“Time to file a grievance.” 

It does not take long to reach what must be the main hall, the closed door quite large but unguarded, and Fran can hear the sound of many loud voices shouting and cheering beyond. Balthier motions them to a side passage, and Fran knows what he is searching for even as he slides the edge of the knife into a thin gap in the wall, and with a quiet click the hatch gives way, the ladder revealing itself.

“I’ll be in the other passage,” he tips his head toward the opposite wall, another hidden hatch, “doing what I can. Go up into the scaffolding, and wait for my signal.”

The viera do not ask what the signal will be, assuming Fran will know it - and she does not need to ask, partnered to him long enough to be sure there will be no mistaking it.

———————————————————-

The ceiling of the great hall had been stripped away when the ship became a passenger vessel, rebuilt with great curved pieces of glass to let in the glories of the sky. Even with the bright lights of the floor below, Fran can still pick out the weak pinpoints of a few stars beyond the high canyon walls. It had been a ballroom, once upon a time, with a lingering sheen here and there on the old parquet floors. Whatever majesty remains is rather marred by the slapdash nature of its decoration, a few shabby gambling tables in a corner, statues piled high in another, and crates stacked on top of one another, some of them glittering with gold and others with new weapons or potions. A treasure room as well as a command center - a vault, to keep an eye on all that is theirs. A showcase to display their wealth to enemies and allies alike - and for now, it seems, also a place for punishment.

The metal pathways are rusted, not entirely trustworthy even to a viera’s light step, but that does mean they are well abandoned and provide a full view of the floor below. Fran counts out well over fifty men standing and lounging in a loose circle around a makeshift fighting ring, where two men circle each other with knives, a considerable amount of blood splashed across the ground, stains from where it has seeped into the wood and what might be a carpet, rolled up and set aside to be thrown over it all for fancier occasions. Fran wonders if they’d put it out when the Judge Magister had come here, when he’d told them of the destination and put the money down and bid them bring a viera along for luck.

“Come now, Esket, you thieving son of a whore! You had enough energy to stab me in the back, you ought to be able to do the same to your accomplice!”

Fran recognizes the man lording over it all, seated on an ornate chair raised up above the crowd. It must be Jacus - and he had been in Giruvegan. He had been the one who’d hit Ajra and dragged her away. Now with a fine overcoat and a high cut pair of boots, wine glass in hand, all the trappings of a gentleman poorly fitted on what is barely a man. 

The viera spread out around her, bows drawn and arrows nocked, waiting for Balthier. Fran glances around the room, wondering which wall he is behind, if he’s found what he is looking for. If those passages will be as abandoned as he’d hoped for - and then she is distracted by a wild cry, one of the fighters below finally dealing a killing blow. She does not know if it is Esket or his ally who takes a knife to the gut, down to his knees and then the ground. His opponent stands over him, panting for breath as the crowd yells and mutters around him, bets being paid out as gil changes hands, mainly annoyed at the end to their diversions.

“Well fought, sir!” Jacus calls from his throne, “we shall take it into consideration when delivering our verdict.”

The only warning he gives, before raising a crossbow and shooting the victor through the heart, to hearty cheers from the surrounding men. It is clear to see among her sisters which have not seen this side of humes - Joce looks shocked, Ljen saddened - though Sije and Tyrn show no interest, barely shifting the grip on their bows.

“Open it!”

The bodies are quickly dragged backward, to the edge of what Fran realizes is a circle barely visible in the ground, approximately the width of the fighting ring, opening up before them. A storage space that might have held spare weapons, when it had carried soldiers, or spare silver when it had entertained passengers, but as the floor pulls away Fran cannot imagine where such a thing might come from, nor what madness would wish to keep it here. 

Writhing shadows over twisted bones, that is all Fran can see, wrong in a way even the creatures in the Feywood had not been. At least those were alive, strange as they were, but with the pit comes a stench of such death, such unnatural existence - and she sees Aisa recoil, Tyrn’s lip curling in an instinctive snarl. Nabudis - the broken thing feels like Nabudis, like the Strahl hanging at the lip of that decimated cairn. 

Fran watches the dark lumps of flesh shift across its surface, dropping wetly to the ground only to draw back into its body, a creature poised at the edge of death but unable to die. It moves with hideous, graceless speed, letting out a wretched cry as it lunges up, talons scrabbling a few feet from the top of what suddenly seems a very shallow pit. Fran catches sight of what could be a beak, and for a moment it seems the nub of a wing might flutter against a distended spine before it drops back to the ground on four paws, and yowls. A keening, gaping scream that seems similar, if quieter to what they heard on their way inside - until the cry they _did_ hear answers it, loud enough to make the catwalk shudder beneath them.

If Fran finds it alarming, the brigands do not seem to think it so. The bodies are kicked unceremoniously into the hole, some of the men edging away from the pit but others fascinated by the wet, tearing sounds that quickly rise up, difficult to tell if the creature is eating - can eat - or is simply satisfied to tear the former crew to shreds.

Sije gestures for her attention, glancing once more to the sky above them, and as Fran looks up she knows they all share the same thought - smash the beams, shatter the glass and send it all crashing down. It could be done, if the spell were large enough, and it would certainly clear the room - and possibly take them with it. What Balthier would refer to as a brilliant terrible idea.

“Let’s see, let’s see… what else is on our docket for the night?” Jacus feigns nonchalance as poorly as he does humanity, “Ah, yes. Bring her out!”

Of course they had been looking for Ajra the moment they arrived, Fran half-certain she would be near the throne, or perhaps with the statues, displayed prominently as yet another trophy. Or this might be that as well, the metal cargo arm swinging out from the wall and Ajra dangling from the end of it. Bound by her arms and hanging limply and they have not closed the floor, suspending her only a few feet above the monster’s snapping jaws at it leaps at her once and again. Fran would think there could be nothing worse to see - but the girl is so still, and does not panic or struggle or even raise her head. How many times have they done this to her? Every night, since she was taken? The mercenaries are whistling, cat calls and taunts and all manner of vulgar things, unaware of the arrows trained upon them, of how foolishly they seal their fate.

“Here we are again, love,” Jacus says, a mocking smile on his face, “You know, I’d been told you viera were a bit more interesting than this. At the very least, I thought you might have a little bit of a fight in you. Give us all some sport.”

Sije looks at her from across the span of the room, her intent clear - they cannot wait for Balthier, they must act _now_. Fran thinks it too, even as she looks across the room for her first target - and her eyes catch on a man moving slowly at the edge of the crowd, unnoticed by the others and casually making his way toward the other side of the room - toward the crane controls. He glances up at her - Balthier’s clear, determined gaze meeting her own, and whether he had been unsuccessful or Ajra’s appearance had changed his plan, this is the best chance they’re going to get. 

“No? Such a shame. I’ll make you an offer - all you have to do is tell me where your fellow viera are, and I’ll take you home to them.” 

Of course, of course - what does one do with a viera but look for the way to capture more? Tyrn is edging her way onto a broken bit of scaffolding, trying to gain the proper angle to put an arrow through the bastard’s heart, though none of them can guarantee it. He is the leader, it would be better to take him first - but a part of Fran hopes he will not die so soon, that he might live to see what they will make of his little kingdom.

“Well, perhaps we might change your mind. Think about it - it’s not as if you really need your legs to talk.”

Jacus makes a gesture, and the gears whir, Ajra dropping an inch, two inches closer to where the creature snaps and roars - and then he looks over, menace shifting to confusion at the sound of what can only be the security doors sliding closed all across the ship, grinding into place, the room locking down one exit at a time. Loud as it is, the sound of the crane coming to a halt goes unnoticed - and there is no sound at all when the viera launch their opening volley, second arrows nocked and loosed before half of the mercenaries have even had a chance to look up. 

It’s not impossible for even the poorest man to learn magic, but real power only comes with time and training. A true skill to maintain one’s focus in a firefight, and not for every man to learn. Of all these men, perhaps a dozen at best raise barriers, and this is no force joined by honor or allegiance - each man cares only for himself and nothing more. The defense is weak, their retaliation equally so, while viera spells and viera arrows rain down without mercy. Fran looses her third arrow before the first bolt comes anywhere near her, the ping of a bullet against her barrier a few moments later and she’s seeking out Jacus with her next shot - the former Judge the only one with any real magical ability, the one who poses the greatest threat. 

Fran finds him just as he finds her, and she grabs at the catwalk, throwing herself out of the way as the fireball roars through the space where she was standing moments before. 

Sije is the first to empty her quiver, and turns herself into an arrow loosed, dropping from the catwalk to break her fall on the spine of a mercenary, sending him down to the ground and coming up with her claws in the gut of the nearest man. Howls of pain and rage fill the air, difficult to tell which are Sije’s kills and which the men hitting themselves as they try to shoot at her. A few unfortunates are knocked off balance in the crush of the crowd, and tumble wildly into the pit, the beast within making quick work of them. 

Balthier is still at the crane controls, throwing switches madly, fighting with a panel that appears to have jammed. All the noise seems to have reached Ajra at last - she is twisting now, trying to gain some purchase against the chain or swing herself forward, out of danger. All at once, she drops a few more perilous inches, screaming as the monster nearly catches the edge of her foot in its claws. 

Tyrn roars in fury, and Fran realizes what she is aiming for in horror as Jacus steps forward and lines up a shot aimed right at the helpless girl. An arrow pierces his shields, grazing his shoulder and throwing his aim off enough that the bullet finds the chain rather than Ajra’s heart, but Fran can see the links giving way, though, bending with the strain, and any moment they will snap and they will lose her forever.

“Sije!” Fran shouts, throwing one hand toward the sky, knowing she will be seen and understood even as she drops from the scaffolding. Hoping her sisters will find shelter even as she sees the growing brightness of their spells igniting one on top of the other, high above her head - and a sharp burst of crackling power that must be Balthier’s own magic, finally igniting the blast that is more than enough to shatter glass and twist steel and bring the whole sky down around them. 

Fran’s boots hit the ground and she is rolling, crouched and running in that spare second of a thousand pounds of glass and steel suspended above their heads. She leaps, pulling the barrier spell around herself and Ajra even as she has the viera in her arms, the chain snapping free as they are both knocked to safety on the other side of the pit, and the world crashes down.

————————————————

The first sound to come back to Fran is that of Ajra’s breathing, the beat of her heart, and Fran feels relief and triumph even with nothing else known. Slowly, she opens her eyes, looking around at what remains of the room, a twisted wreckage of shattered cargo, blood on glass and men who can do little more than twitch and groan and breathe their last. Even the monster from Nabudis has not escaped unscathed, a great beam pinning it, splitting it nearly in two, and it shrieks weakly for a moment before subsiding into silence. 

Joce and Ljen are with her in moments, helping Ajra to stand. Untying her arms and murmuring soft and gentle words, pressing close as if they can block out everything else but their concern. Fran quickly searches out the rest of her kin - Aisa is near, Sije making a careful check of the bodies as she passes. Tyrn had somehow managed to keep her perch above, only now making her way across the remains of the catwalk, beams hanging perilously at odd angles, to reach them. 

Balthier moves into view, the most damaged of all of them with only burst of red on his sleeve, but by the way he’s moving Fran thinks he’s already healed it. He looks to her, and Ajra, and then to the other side of the room, behind a pile of broken statues, where Fran can hear the sound of someone trying not to make a sound.

“You might as well come out.” He calls, anger laced through the dull bitterness in his voice. “I’ve sealed all the doors. No one else is coming, even if they wished to save you.”

Silence, for a moment, and then Jacus slumps around the corner, limping slowly into view. Battered and bleeding, with an arrow in his thigh, though he’s snapped off the end so Fran cannot see who made the lucky shot. He holds himself with all the disdain and pride he can manage, and Fran steps in front of Ajra when he dares to look at her. It makes him smile, and now, now is a good time to end this. Balthier murmurs a few words to Sije, and the viera nods and goes off toward the crane as he steps closer, leaning on a table that has somehow managed to survive the battle, glancing to the toppled throne and back again with a smile nearly as unpleasant as Jacus’ own.

“Judge Malivar Jacus. Or what’s left of you. I thought I recognized the name. Once a proud privateer under Archadia’s colors, attacking Rozarrian merchants as you saw fit, running back to the Empire before they could catch you up at it. All that pillage and murder ignored, until you got greedy - or was it reckless, or stupid? Sinking a Bhujerban cruiser and thinking it would not come back to your door.”

Jacus’ eyes narrow. “Who are you.”

“No one of consequence.” Balthier says, blithely examining the papers strewn across the table, forged documents and stolen information. He seems unconcerned, and Fran knows it for the lie it is. “Now you have to bribe the Archadians to look the other way when you need to take a piss. What’s the price of that these days?”

“One I’m quite willing to pay.” The man’s eyes keep flicking toward the far doors, and Fran can hear the distant sound of angry men, steel against steel. Trying to get in, perhaps fighting each other for the chance at a treasure that might now be up for the taking. Balthier only smiles.

“Wonderful safety systems on these old ships, you know. A bit simplistic but quite reliable.” 

Fran hears the mechanisms turn, as Sije gets the crane working again, and slowly the length of chain drops down.

“Listen,” Jacus says, looking from it to her and then Balthier again, “you’ve obviously got what you came for. It’s all business, that’s all this is, and…” He takes a step back, only to find Tyrn there, and perhaps he cannot feel regret or remorse, but there is fear in his eyes now, skittering about even as he tries to cover it up. “We can work something out. You’re not here from Archades, obviously - but that just opens up the possibilities.”

“You took something from Nabudis.”

“It was on the ship, the one they dragged here. It came after us - it _ate_ my crew. Some of my strongest-”

“You planned on selling it.” Balthier said. “Hiding it from Archadia, and then giving it to the highest bidder - likely Rozarria, so they could study it, maybe make a weapon out of it. Except one day it… gave you a surprise, and so you decided to keep it nearby, to see if it might continue to prove profitable.”

Fran looks from the pit, back to the doors, remembering that distant scream.

Jacus laughs, an ugly, nervous, sound - he’s still looking for a way to get the advantage of this, even surrounded as he is. If he took the upper hand he would gladly kill them, or sell them, or torture them for what they’ve done to him tonight, for how they’ve wounded his pride.

“A surprise, yes. You might call it that - and yes, we kept it. Wanted to see how many more of them it might spit out. I don’t remember there being a law against that.”

“Only common decency. Well outside of Archadia’s jurisdiction.” Balthier says. “Why were you hired to go to Giruvegan?”

Jacus’ eyes widen, not expecting the question. “Judge Magister Bergan, he’ll ask us to do a job now and then. Archades may have thrown me away, but they still find their use for me.”

“Why? What was he after?”

“You really think he told me?” Jacus snorts. “I’d eat my coat if it was other than Nethicite. It’s all they talk about, it’s all anyone talks about… what do you think I know? The coin is good. Bergan says he wants to go, I go. He says he needs men, I bring them. He wants a viera, for whatever reason…”

Fran flexes her claws, and he goes silent, though there is nothing like shame in his eyes.

“Did Draklor know about this? Does the name Doctor Cid mean anything to you?”

Balthier looks at him intently, and Jacus can’t keep the slight smirk off his face, that he might have the upper hand even if there’s nothing to do about it, even if it’s only through ignorance.

“Just who are you, boy?”

Fran will wonder later if it all might not have ended there, even with Sije and the chain and Balthier’s bitter rage. He looks back to where Ajra is still being held between Joce and Ljen, and his expression softens. She thinks he will motion to Tyrn to end the former Judge with a single swift blow and they will leave what is left of this place to rot. It feels as if they have already been here too long, and Balthier turns back and is about to speak when his foot hits a half-toppled crate under the table, enough to send it tipping forward, spilling its contents onto the floor between them. 

The brightness of the moogles’ poms seems garish in the wreckage, and more terrible with every moment she stares at them. Balthier cannot seem to look away, bending down to pick up a small, red puff that has rolled to the edge of his boot.

“You beat her. You starved her.” He says, quietly, still staring at the pom in his hand. “You were going to torture her, until she told you where you could find her friends and her family. You were going to do this.”

Whatever Jacus might say to defend himself, it disappears into a choked-off gasp as Balthier drives his fist hard into the man’s stomach, and the man drops to his knees and then down to the floor, groaning in renewed pain from his wounded thigh.

“Chain him up.” Balthier says flatly, and Tyrn moves to tie his hands. Fran goes to help her, her gaze on Balthier’s back, his shoulders still set in silent fury as he goes to a panel in the corner of the room, calmly prying it away from the wall and calmly making adjustments and every calm motion full of nothing but violence. By the time Jacus has his breath back they have attached him to the chain, and he grunts as Sije lifts him into the air.

“You took it from the _Khiimori_ , and locked it into the old ammunition storage,” Balthier says, “behind the blast doors, so it couldn’t break through. Even a dreadnought can’t carry more than one set of those doors, though. If it got free, nothing else on the ship could stop it for long.”

“What are you…” Jacus stops, as the answer comes to him. “You can’t be serious.” 

Balthier does not answer, moving from one panel to the next. He pulls the pieces he’d taken from the radio out of his pockets, swiftly discarding the coat, and within a few moments the controls all light up under his hands. 

The high, tearing scream sounds out as it did before - but closer now, much closer, perhaps accompanied by the sound of shrieking metal. Ajra lets out a soft cry, and Ljen and Joce quickly lead her away, tracing a path through the debris, Aisa covering their exit. Fran remains, with Tyrn and Sije - their sister is safe, this is Balthier’s business, hume business now - but there is still a grim satisfaction to be had. 

“Archadian Graylands base, copy.” Balthier says. “Do you copy Graylands, over.”

“It’s the Grays here, south tower. Who’s this on the signal?”

“Judge Bunansa broadcasting from a nest of bastards in one of the western canyons. I’m sending you the coordinates, over.”

“What was that name?” Jacus says, and now his voice is high and tight with what’s trying to be anger but sounds like fear, “what was that bloody name?!”

“Repeat that name, Judge,” the radio says, but Balthier ignores him as well.

“I’ve got nothing but dead men here, Gray south. It appears as if they’ve stolen something from Nabudis. Big and dangerous and rather angry. I suggest you bring your best magicks and some long-range artillery.”

Fran can hear shouting from the far side of the room now, behind the doors. The sound of shooting, of pounding feet and screaming and what may very well be the crunching of bone. 

“Copy that. Repeat your name, Judge? We didn’t catch it and-” 

Balthier shuts off the radio. Jacus is still flailing against the chain, struggling to see behind him where Balthier stands.

“Who are you? Why the hell are you here?

“Rendering a verdict. One fallen Judge to another,” Balthier says, circling the man. “I sentence you, Judge Jacus, to be yourself, for all the rest of your days.” Balthier glances toward the door, the sudden thud enough to send tremors through the ground at their feet, and then another, and another, and the steel begins to creak under the strain. “A betting man might give you a full half-hour, but I doubt it.”

—————————————————

They take turns carrying Ajra back through the Grays, and she breathes soft questions into Fran’s ear - How long had she been captive? Are they all right? Fran can only be grateful, happier with each answer she can give. Ajra is weak and tired but not broken - she knows where she is and who they are and is not too frightened to speak. 

The sound of engines reaches them perhaps halfway back to the Strahl - the Archadians, swooping down and they’ve found the hideout and perhaps even noticed the beast skulking about in its ruins. Or, Balthier says, they’re simply too lazy to bother with anything other than firing from the air, and Bergan will be put out for the few moments it takes him to find another useful rat scurrying at the edges of Archadia. 

An impressive display of their power, the glow of the burning ship lining the edge of the canyon walls in orange and gold for nearly a mile in all directions, though none of them wish to watch it for long. Balthier keeps well ahead of them, as if to grant them whatever privacy he can, though his words still echo in her mind - _one fallen Judge to another_. When they finally reach the Strahl he steps by to let them pass, and goes very still when Ajra’s fingers catch and tighten on his sleeve.

“Thank you.”

“It was nothing.” Balthier says tightly, looking away, “less than nothing.”

Sije sets their course, and they rise up out of the Grays, and no one looks back. Balthier has the wheel, and Ajra is swiftly tucked away in Fran’s quarters, nestled against Ljen’s side and sleeping soundly in moments. Fran sits down, stretching out in the doorway, and glances down the hall. Wondering if Balthier has fallen asleep, leaving Nono to watch over the Strahl, or if he is still awake, taking in the cool respite of an open sky. 

For a while all is calm and quiet, and Fran rests and wonders when they all might gather together again, if it could happen for a kinder purpose the next time. They journey to the Garif now, on the open plains, a quiet people who move at a slow, steady pace and have always welcomed the viera. Ljen and Joce plan to stay until Ajra has fully recovered, until they have found a safe haven - and even as Ljen says it, it is clear none of them believe in such a place, not anymore.

“You are to return to your hunts and marks, then?” Fran says. Sije looks up, from where she’d been studying a string of carved beads, the wood clicking between her claws.

“I imagine there will be plenty to be had, from all corners,” a flick of her ear, amusement and concern together in her voice, “Krjn did not know how one hume could command so high a bounty. I do not think they could raise it to what he is worth.”

A compliment worth taking, and a warning she does not need, though Sije hardly expects her to heed it. “Balthier would put much more to rights, but he cannot do it alone.”

“He is a gentle one, your hume.” The words are soft, Ajra awake again and looking around the room with a curious smile. Little for her to see in this room that Balthier has not had some part in: jewels and glass, colored paper and priceless parchment - a tangle of chaos and civilization, wealth and trifle, sorrow and anger and joy that is strange and precious and uniquely, incomparably Balthier. 

“He has our honor in him,” Sije agrees, “I hope he may keep it in the days ahead.”

————————————————-

The ship touches down. Fran sees her sisters off, and does not bother with the cockpit, or Balthier’s quarters, making her way down through the length of the Strahl to the main engine room instead. An unexpected welcome, when the heavy door creaks open under her hand. It wouldn’t have been difficult to pick the lock, but this is his place of solace and the first time she has sought to enter it, and there is a good deal to be grateful for, to be invited in.

The main engine bay is a rather small room, thick with Mist and lit by the flickering blue of the skystone, the soft hum of powerful magicks a steady constant in the air. Balthier’s tools and weapons are strewn haphazardly across the floor, lying where they were dropped, and she follows the short trail to the pair of boots sticking out under the engine’s core. All the work there is painstakingly delicate, a place he might escape to think about wires and tubes and nothing more, and he knows she is there, so Fran waits. 

“A man can’t help but wonder,” he says, carefully, “no matter what he wishes to believe, that maybe great Archades knows of what it speaks. A title cannot merely be abandoned, and being born into that world is more than just coincidence and good fortune. Maybe I cannot simply wash my hands of it, and pretend...” His voice is odd, echoing from beneath so much metal, and hoarse, weighed down with pain. “It is impossible to avoid being complicit in it, you know, not completely. Every Judge has his price, there’s no getting around that. I did, I certainly did, even if it was never for… even if I never… but who knows? I had barely begun. Who knows what a handful of years and the wrong circumstance might prove? Who knows what part of that is still in me, and I do not even know it, will not see it until it is far too late.”

“You could never be that man, Balthier.”

He laughs, unhappily, still safely ensconced in the heart of the Strahl. “You call me that, even now. I am grateful for it, Fran, more than you know. I would like to think…” he pauses, and it lasts one heartbeat, two. “A sensible man would understand if you wished to part company, and even I can see the reason in it.” 

“Do you believe I would have done any less to those men? Do you think we would have let any of them survive? If they did not wish to die they never should have touched her.”

“She will recover?”

Fran nods. “Our lives are long, and Ajra is yet young. The others will stay with her, and see that all is set to rights. She will be safe, and we will all be more careful in our dealings with empires.”

He does not answer, and Fran tips her head, listening for what she cannot hear beneath the sound of the engine. The catch of his breath, the unsteady beat of his heart.

“You are not responsible for the actions of other men, Balthier. However much you might wish it so.”

“ _Wish_ it…” He says, suddenly harsh, drawing himself from beneath the engine to look up at her, rising up to sit with his back against the engine and always that look, that there is some secret - always some secret - that will break everything. A judgment she is supposed to bring down on him, and her refusal only causes more pain. His voice is rough and rich, full of all things - mockery and bitter pride, wistfulness and scorn and awe.

“My name is Ffamran Mied Bunansa, first son and heir of House Bunansa. My father is Cidolfus Demen Bunansa, head researcher and founder of the Draklor Laboratories.” All this the truth she has learned for herself, but now Fran knows what it sounds like to hear him say it, how heavy the inheritance and how far he wishes to fling it away. “My father built the airships that won them Nalbina. He is the one to inflict Manufacted Nethicite on all Ivalice. He is the one… House Bunansa… _my_ House is to blame for the destruction in Nabradia, for the slaughter and desecration of Nabudis. I let it happen. I let it all happen.”

“The Midlight Shard. You knew of it before anyone else.”

Balthier grimaces. “My father was looking for the Sun-Cryst, and acquiring the Shards was the best first step. He was determined to possess them, and yes, I knew it - I knew before _Vayne Solidor_ did. I do not know if it was by his own hand, or if he drove Nabudis to some act of desperation, but…” He has never said the words he is about to speak, but Fran can tell they have always been with him, worn down in deep grooves in his most private contemplations, “If I had killed him when I had the chance, Nabradia would still have her capitol and her monarch… and a future. Dalmasca would still be free.” 

Does he expect her scorn for this? Fran tries to imagine killing Mjrn or Jote in any circumstance, for the worst of crimes. Let alone for what had not yet happened, for an evil that still seems nearly beyond comprehension.

“I do not think I would wish to know such a man, who could murder his father in cold blood,” she says, “You did not know what would happen in Nabudis. You could not have imagined it.”

“I should have.” He raises his hands and lets them fall, a helpless, frustrated gesture, “I could have done… I _should_ have…”

“You tried.”

Cruel of her, perhaps, to keep offering forgiveness when he wants condemnation, but Fran stands her ground here in his last sanctuary, silent and determined. He looks to her, and to the floor, and perhaps then to some inner horizon. She tells herself it is the light that casts such a pallor on his skin - he is overtired, this has been a trial for them both and she wants nothing more than to go to him but some inner certainty keeps her where she is. An instinct, that this is the moment, it is here or never, to accept what he knows is true or never stop running. 

Fran watches, Balthier silent and still - and then, mercifully, comes the moment when he wavers, and buckles, and finally relents. A weary shake of his head, because she is persistent and his partner and because he loves her, and trusts her more than anything, more than himself. He rubs a hand across his face and stops, smirking a little at the stubble he finds, that persistent reminder he obviously has no need for.

“When I was young, I admired my father above all men. I thought he knew everything - about airships, about the world. It seemed wonderful that he was always so busy. Always important, even before… I thought I would grow up, and we would build a ship like the world had never seen and we would travel all of Ivalice. He and my mother and I.” Balthier shrugs, but the false nonchalance is barely tatters now, worn clean through from too much use, “I don’t know if he ever really loved her. I don’t know if he loved either of us.”

Fran has lived among humes for so long, and yet there are things she still cannot find the sense of. Joys and tragedies that never happened in the Wood - there is simply no name for what Balthier is, what he has done so far beyond what she might call exile. What his father, his kin have driven him to… there are no words at all.

“Do you know the last thing my mother asked of me before she died? To give him her apologies. Dear gods, he’d left her to die and she was only sorry she could not live to see him home - that she’d _interrupted_ his _work_.” Balthier slams his fist against the floor once, twice. “Knowing he’d abandoned her - she was terrified, half-gone with fever and she’d still… oh, the bastard. The absolute bastard, that she should die _begging_.” 

He does not strike out again, but every muscle is tense, even the slightest gesture badly strained. “The research always came first. _Always_. Before his family. Well before his dying wife. After that, well - I learned the true cost of all that… genius. How little he cared for anything he could not take apart, could not see in pieces under his hands. Answers for the sake of answers, no matter the consequences or who must suffer for them.”

“You have always sought the Sun-Cryst. It was the reason we went to Rabanastre.”

“Finding a single Shard would have been bounty enough, I did not lie to you about that. I thought it would be enough to check Archades, to be the rogue element they could not predict, to slow them down - but yes, the Sun-Cryst has ever been the goal. We must find it before they do, we _must_. You’ve seen well enough what my father is capable of when left to his own desires. The Nethicite is all he cares for. All he loves. If Giruvegan did not make him heartless, it surely made him dangerous.” 

So that is the reason he’d followed on that path so desperately, seeing no other option. Balthier sees her think it, and nods.

“The good Doctor got himself inside the city, years ago. It’s where he learned of Nethicite. Where he started his long conversations with… I don’t know, phantoms? Spirits? Muddled delusions that call themselves gods. I still can’t figure how he stepped past the gate. I had hoped, perhaps, if I could get inside… but it seems the madman’s son receives no special attention.”

“What does he wish to gain?”

A betrayal of Balthier’s anger to consider it, even for a moment - but Fran can’t help but remember the portrait on the wall. The wife that Balthier swears had been so callously thrown away - but they had seemed happy there, in that picture. A proud husband with his loving family - or perhaps all portraits in Archadia are painted so, no matter what the truth may be.

“The mad don’t need reasons. It is why they are mad,” Balthier says bitterly. “No, I am not giving him enough credit. My father is quite complicit in his own insanity. He did not fall into this. He kept his eyes open and his head high, with an emperor’s son there to cheer him on. What should Vayne Solidor care if it destroys the man, as long as it gains him the power he desires?” He flinches slightly, his voice rough. “I speak as if it hasn’t already happened. The princeling indulges the lunatic, and so my father talks to the air for hours and designs an end to all things. Whatever their intentions, Nabudis speaks plain to the result. Archadia cannot take the Cryst, no matter the cost.” 

Except he does not know where it is, or even where the Shards are, Balthier working with nothing more than fragments of a story where he is not the leading man, where he cannot seem to even reach the stage. It speaks in every weary line in his body, in how low he bows his head.

“I am so tired of this… damned, cursed _helplessness_. I don’t know what to do, Fran. I don’t know how to make it right. It’s why I took the Strahl and ran, that I would be free to do what was necessary. I would right the wrongs my House sought to unleash upon the world, to stop them before he could… before… and in the end all my foolish struggle has saved no one.”

He does not move, when she settles herself beside him, her fur rising a little this close to the engine but Fran is used to the Strahl and the way the Mist sings within it. She rubs the backs of her knuckles against his arm, and if her eyes were closed she would think him made of the same metal that surrounds them. 

“I believe Ajra would disagree.”

Ajra, and Sije and all her sisters - and a hundred others, all those strangers he has played the hero for and their gratitude is hardly without value. Balthier looks up, and his eyes are the dark color of the Wood’s deepest glens, its most shadowed, quiet places. He leans against her, and Fran curls around him, holding him close, the tips of her claws light against his skin.

”I cannot ask you to follow me in this, Fran,” he finally murmurs, hot breath stirring the fur at her throat. “One does not cross swords with House Solidor and expect to walk away. I know very well where this will likely end. For all the world, I would not see your neck beneath Archades’ steel. To know that it was I who led you there.”

“As you led me to the Feywood?”

“I didn’t…” He stops, and laughs a little, relaxing against her, “… and I told myself at the start, I _swore_ I would take none into this lunacy with me.”

“I did not leave the Wood that I would be untouched by the world.” Fran says. “I am with you, Balthier. Whatever the path, wherever it might lead.”

He nods, just a little, and for a time it is enough just to sit there in the quiet together - truly together now, and stronger than ever before. Fran does not lack confidence, but there is no need for false bravado. She does not know if they can win this, to survive and see what lies beyond, but simply knowing they will meet it, that they will fight is enough. It has always been enough for her, to meet the future with weapons drawn and ready, and she is not afraid.

“Come to bed, Balthier?”

The only answer is a soft snore, and Fran sighs, smiling a little as she draws him closer. 

———————————————————————————

No secrets left between them, so now and then Balthier will make some mention of his past, and the better memories of that former life. All the races he’d been in as a young man, the records broken and the engines burned clean through. His time as a Judge, and the constant annoyance he’d been to his superiors and his teachers and the men under his command. Even then he’d had the instincts of a pirate, asking questions before throwing punches and buying a round before either of those, when he could. The Judges had not thought much of his strategies, but it had gained him allies and informants he’s used to this day. 

Balthier was practically raised by moogles, he says, his father simply bringing him along with his books and tools. He’d been passed from one perch to the next, resting him on benches and worktables and in cockpits for convenience until someone threw together a mobile of spare parts to keep him occupied. They’d even built a little pair of wings at one point, rigged up with a skystone so he might hover safe and out of the way. Only a fragment, but then his father had made some modifications - always refining the concept - and _then_ they’d spent the better part of an afternoon trying to pry him from the rafters. 

It is true, as he’d said in the beginning, that the crew take their cut of the spoils, that they find the Strahl a fascinating vessel to practice on, but now Fran knows it is more than that, the moogles as loyal as she is - it’s difficult to know who Balthier truly is and be anything else. 

It still doesn’t explain the morning, some weeks on from the Graylands, when Fran wakes up to the sound of a steady, high-pitched squeaking echoing faintly down the corridor. It lasts for at least five minutes before Balthier rolls over, one bleary eye peering out from where he’s thrown an arm across his face. He is not a morning person, at times barely an early-afternoon person, though when he blinks his way into better alertness to see her watching, his affectionate smile is warm as the sunrise. 

An expression that quickly falls into a puzzled frown, and he sits up quickly, as if it might somehow answer the question for him.

“What on earth is that noise? One of the aft drives slip out of place?” 

The strange, chirping cry is not one of the aft drives. Or an unexpected imbalance in a glossair ring. It is not even a door in need of mending. At some point in the night, it seems the Strahl has welcomed a new member to its crew.

“Kupo po… po,” The baby moogle says, reaching out with its paws to grab at its own feet and successful in the attempt, though it knocks itself off-balance doing so, slowly tilting onto its side despite the struggle of tiny, newborn wings. “Po po po… kupo?”

It doesn’t have its pom yet - those grow in as they get older, perhaps at six months, or even a year. A special day for celebration when they finally ‘bloom’ and the color means something, though Fran can’t quite remember exactly how it goes.

“So, this is… Well…” Balthier says, the moogles all drinking tea and watching him blandly, two of them still lazing in bed with engine manuals and all equidistant from the child playing on the floor. None of them seem the slightest bit interested in providing an explanation or claiming ownership. “How did you… no. No, wait - I withdraw the question. Permanently. Gods, it’s too early for this.”

Fran moves past him to crouch down over the baby, who looks up at her - and up, and up - in wide-eyed astonishment. 

“Kupo!”

“Yes, you’re adorable.” Balthier says distractedly, still staring between the moogles. “When exactly did you plan on telling me one of you _isn’t_ a bachelor?”

No one bothers answering that question, and the spluttering half-argument that follows only lasts until Balthier is thoroughly exasperated, the moogles are completely amused and a few more gil pass quietly between them. One more bet paying off in someone’s favor, though Fran can only imagine the terms. 

A happy marriage at sea follows in due course, and if Balthier’s status as ship’s captain is outweighed by his status as lawless rogue, the moogles have their own paperwork already filled out as suits their guilds and clans. The ceremony is simple but beautiful, high above the clouds, with Balthier in a coat he’d stolen from a Rozarrian nobleman and Fran holding the baby moogle who clutches a bundle of flowers that are quite lovely up until the moment it discovers they are also quite edible.

“I now pronounce you man and wife. I hope. Unless you changed places when I wasn’t looking, or you’re already married. To other moogles. You would think I should know how this works.” Balthier waves a hand vaguely. “And this would be the first time I’ve _kept_ anyone from living in sin. Everyone kiss someone, please, and let’s open a case of wine.”

Hours later, Fran wanders past the small common room and the small bench there, usually full of spare ship parts or books. Balthier is stretched out, one hand behind his head and his eyes closed, and the baby moogle sleeps on his chest, letting out the tiniest of chirps with each breath. Fran leans against the wall and watches them, well-contented.

“We are to Balfonheim for the honeymoon, it seems.” Balthier says without opening his eyes. “A chance to show off the newest member of the guild to kin and kind. There is to be a proper naming. You are invited, of course.”

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“I refuse to ask, and Nono will not tell me. So we stand at stalemate,” he says, “I don’t suppose you viera have any special tricks for this kind of thing?”

“Have you tried bribery?” Fran says, and steps closer as the tiny moogle yawns, and blinks - and attacks Balthier’s fingers as the pirate dangles them over its head, swiping at them with tiny claws, and nibbling with a vengeance when he finally manages to catch one.

“It’s weaponized cuteness, is what it is. One day the moogles will take proper advantage of it, and we’ll all be ruined. We just won’t care.” Balthier says, and there is the pause that means he will tell her what is troubling him, if she but gives him the space to do it. “I told them they could leave. Offered an out, the way I did when I first took the Strahl. I told them… a child… it changes things. It ought to.”

“If we do not do this, there will be no safe place for anyone.”

“Nono said as much, and the others agreed with him. I ought to have argued, and yet…” Balthier says, and sighs. “I had told myself it was the best way, to go it alone. I would not hesitate, and I could risk it all because I risked nothing - but this… I believe it may be an easier thing to fight for the future than against the past.”

“Kupo. Po po.” The baby adds solemnly, before rolling over so Fran can scratch between its wings with a clawtip, trilling with delight.

—————————————————

If one is going to steal from the Royal Palace of Rabanastre, there are few worse times than on the eve of the new Consul’s arrival. The Archadian guards will be on their highest alert in two years, and rumors abound that any who wish to assassinate Vayne Solidor will have to queue up for the privilege. It is an event that any sensible sky pirate would take great pains to avoid, and indeed most with the faintest hint of a blemish on their record have once again decamped to Balfonheim or the seedier ports of Rozarria until the whole business sorts itself out. 

Yet Fate is ever fickle, and Fortune will demand her tithe, and so it is with not a week to spare and just before dawn that Balthier receives an ornately scripted missive revealing exactly where the Dusk Shard has been tucked away - in the dead center of the palace vaults.

“I could have sworn we were there. In that very room. We must have walked right past the damned thing.” Balthier says, studying the map, the description of the statue, his mouth set in a grim line. “Once Vayne has the leisure to examine those vaults in full, Archades will have their hands on a second Shard. I think they’ve had enough fun with the first.”

Fran frowns, sliding a claw across the edge of the page he’s set on the desk. A simple note, and unsigned. “A strange windfall, or perhaps a curse - but why is it ours at all? Surely, if this were true, there would be far more coin in passing the information directly to Archades?”

Balthier laughs slightly. “More coin, perhaps, but not the Shard itself. I imagine the hands that rendered this note were not those who ordered it written. We are but a proxy for a proxy, for one who does not wish to catch the Lord Consul’s eye.”

Fran knows what he knows, and how little comfort there is to be had in it.

“Bhujerba.”

“A piece of the Dynast-King’s legacy would buy Ondore considerable leverage, with Archadia and Rozarria both. Nabudis must have unnerved him enough to make it worth risking.” Balthier has not looked up from the papers, and Fran is sure he is already thinking about how best to plan this attack, for any hope of success. “Perhaps it is merely a coincidence, that his agent chose me. Duke Delalsiri, I believe. You can tell by the way he loops his l’s together.”

Fran knows full well, Balthier does not believe in coincidence any more than she does. 

“You would think if you were truly meant to succeed, this duke would have given you more warning.”

“Well, I did sleep with his wife.” 

Fran stares, more out of habit than surprise. Balthier shrugs. 

“The party was dull and I had no pressing engagements. It seemed impolite to decline.”

Easier to ignore it and move on than to bother tossing him out a hatch. They have been partners far too long now, Fran would be obliged to go retrieve him.

“Ondore knows of you, and what you are to Archades?”

“He does like to keep informed.”

“Enough to know we have no intention of giving him the Dusk Shard?”

The sun breaks over the horizon, and Balthier grins the way a man would who knows nothing for what hangs in balance, how powerful the forces allied against him and how fast and hard they will strike. If Fran did not know him, she would think him but a reckless fool - and not the King of All Reckless Fools, who knows this gamble to the last gil. If Bhujerba’s invitation is not simply a trap to make him look good for Archadia, or some kind of diversion while Ondore launches his true plan elsewhere, then certainly the Marquis has no intention of allowing them to hold on to the Shard for long. Ondore would never allow them to bring such a useful weapon to neutral ground, to make a pledge for peace with the price of skystone for new airships, new dreadnoughts and frigates rising by the hour.

As if the sages at Bur-Omisace will be enough to even stop what has happened, what _is_ happening, Archadia and Rozarria at the cusp of all-out war. Fran knows the moment they find the Dusk Shard there is not a power in Ivalice which will not seek to take it from them, and not a single safe port they will have to hide in. It is not a power they can use, save to seek out an even greater one, with no idea who might stand guard at the Sun Cryst’s gates, or what they will do if they do manage to reach it.

Insanity by any measure, and there is no other course to chart.

“You have to admit, Fran,” Balthier says, turning the ship south, toward Rabanastre, toward Vayne Solidor and the vast unknown, “no matter what happens, it will make for a magnificent story.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Obviously when I think three parts what I mean is nine. Long fic is long.
> 
> 2\. The name ‘Graylands’ I grabbed from Vagrant Story, one of the best games ever made. Also the snowflies. And the giant crab.
> 
> 3\. Does anyone else find Balthier’s reveal of his past in the game to seem bafflingly shoehorned in to no useful dramatic effect? Yeah, this fic is apparantly 50,000 words of _I sure do_.


End file.
